He came, he roared, he bellowed, he boasted — and he kicked proverbial tail. Out of the crowded field of 17 contestants in the GOP’s presidential beauty pageant, Donald Trump is the last man standing, after repeatedly defying the oddsmakers, the political establishment, the media thought cartel, the political correctness gestapo, and a multitude of naysaying special interest groups.

The exits of Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich from the race, following Trump’s decisive Indiana primary victory on May 3, have left the bellicose billionaire with a clear road all the way to Cleveland, where the Republican Party convention will take place in July. The outcome of that convention is still by no means clear, since there are still many tricks party leaders can pull. But should Trump emerge from the convention as the GOP standard bearer, there is then, of course, the general election in November, where he would face off against (presumably) Hillary Clinton — and whatever third-party spoiler efforts are thrown against him by the #NeverTrump Republican defectors. That main event would also assuredly bring a new tidal wave of anti-Trump media attacks and violent protests aimed at derailing the New York mogul’s brazen White House bid.

Savior, Satan — or Neither?

To say Donald Trump elicits strong emotions is an understatement. While virtually all elections have a polarizing effect, Trump has brought to the current fray an outsized polarization to match his outsized ego. To many Trumpistas he is the savior who will finally set the country right and “Make America Great Again!” To the Never Trumpers, he is the devil incarnate (or some facsimile thereof) who would, if allowed to become president, usher in the end of the Republic — and maybe even the end of the world.

This writer is neither a Trumpista nor a Never Trumper. As a matter of full disclosure, I should confess that I do not like the man; never have. I agree with his critics (from the Right, Left, and center) that he is crass, crude, vulgar, arrogant, and narcissistic to a degree that exceeds, perhaps, the level of these same vices that we’ve come to accept among politicians. I say perhaps because Trump doesn’t encase himself in a facade of fake pieties, false modesty, and finely parsed press statements like the typical paragon of the political class. He’s a rough-and-tumble entertainer/entrepreneur who is used to having his way and is given to over-the-top antics and statements that guarantee more limelight and celebrity brand appeal. In a March 7, 2016 article for the print edition of The New American (“Dump Trump, or Promote Him?”), Charles Scaliger appropriately compared Trump to Marcus Licinius Crassus, the uber-wealthy Roman plutocrat, from whom we derive the pejorative term “crass,” and who played a key role in the descent of the Roman Republic into the tyranny of the Caesars.

However, as a nation, we have already slid far down the slippery slope toward Caesarian empire and tyranny — under the leadership of Republicans and Democrats who exude the “presidential” style and temperament Trump so obviously lacks. Would a Trump presidency really be worse for America — politically, economically, morally, militarily — than the leadership we’ve received from recent White House occupants (both Republican and Democrat), or what we could reasonably expect from the current alternatives? Or to approach the question from the opposite direction: Are there some crucial issues on which we might reasonably expect that Trump would slow, or even reverse, our precipitous slide? Is this why the powers that be attack him with such relentless and unprecedented fury? These are critically important questions that we may be able to answer in the affirmative. This being the case, we will be setting out here, in what follows, a fair and clear-minded assessment of the positive and negative potential of a Trump presidency vis-à-vis the current political-economic-social context.

Outsider vs. Insiders

This is the year of the populist outsider, as evidenced not only by the campaigns of Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders, but also by the success of upstart parties and candidates across Europe as well. A great many voters are fed up with nonstop empty promises from the veteran politicians who invariably give way to politics as usual — with the same, inevitable, destructive results. Trump realized this early on and has cast his campaign around the central core message that not only is he the only outsider who is running for the highest political office in the land (and the world) but that he is the only outsider who has a chance of winning and shaking the system up. (Dr. Ben Carson is also a political outsider, but he lacked the universal name recognition, bravado, and financial resources of Trump.) Not only is he a political outsider, goes the Trump message, but he is a successful businessman to boot, who can bring fresh approaches and desperately needed hardheaded realism to help solve our battered economy.

Certainly two of the signature Trump issues that have resonated with his core constituency and mobilized them are his strident opposition to the continued flood of illegal immigration and the dangerous “free trade” agenda, as typified by the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). If, as president, Trump made good on these two promises alone, he would set back the destructive agenda of the “insider” politicians by at least several years, which would give Americans of a constitutionalist bent a shot at reclaiming America. More on that, in a moment, but first, let’s discuss this insider-outsider thing, which is central to the Trump phenomenon.

Television news interviews with the average pro-Trump man/woman on the street regularly confirm that much of his appeal comes from the fact that he is an outsider, not a professional politician, not a Washington, D.C., denizen. Obviously this same label does not apply to Senator Bernie Sanders, who has spent his entire adult life in politics. Sanders’ claim to outsider status, say he and his supporters, is justified because he stalwartly opposes the Wall Street banksters and corporatists and their lackeys in Washington. That’s their claim, but it was spectacularly falsified when Sanders sabotaged Representative Ron Paul’s “Audit the Fed” bill in 2010 so that the big banks he claims to be fighting could continue to operate in secrecy with the Federal Reserve — and continue to rob Americans blind. Dr. Ron Paul, on the other hand, is a genuine outsider, despite serving more than two decades in Congress. He used his time in political office to resolutely, tirelessly, and much of the time single-handedly, fight and roll back the federal government’s relentless usurpations of power beyond the narrow confines of the U.S. Constitution. In doing so, he fought the insiders in his own Republican Party, as well as those in the Democrat Party. In fighting the Federal Reserve and the Wall Street powers that operate behind it and through it, Representative Paul was taking on the Insiders with a capital “I,” those political and financial insiders who not only occupy positions of power inside powerful institutions, but also share a unified subversive vision of concentrating and centralizing all global authority under a world government, a New World Order.

These pro-world government Insiders operate through a number of semi-secret organizations, such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), the Trilateral Commission (TC), the (British) Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA, aka Chatham House), the Aspen Institute, the Club of Rome, and the World Economic Forum, as well as ultra-secret gatherings such as the Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove.

Insider operative Newt Gingrich made a very significant statement about Trump in this regard during an interview on Fox News on March 4, 2016. The former speaker of the house was commenting on former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s television rant against Trump the previous day. The Romney speech signified, he said, “the panic of the establishment wing of the [Republican] Party.” “Now they’re faced with the prospect of Donald Trump becoming the leader of the party and that absolutely drives them crazy,” Gingrich charged. “Why?” asked Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. “Well because he’s an outsider,” Gingrich responded, “he’s not them, he’s not part of the club, he’s uncontrollable, you know, he hasn’t been through the initiation rites, he didn’t belong to the secret society.”

Newt Gingrich is in a position to know. For many years (up until at least 2013) he was himself a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Both inside and outside of Congress, he has functioned as a reliable promoter of the globalist agenda, and as a result has enjoyed enormous financial success and access to the corridors of power. There is little evidence to suggest he has abandoned the Insiders he has served so faithfully for so long. So why, then, has he been one of the foremost defenders of Trump among the establishment intelligentsia? The key is in Newt’s comment that Trump is “uncontrollable.” However, if the Insiders are unsuccessful in stopping the “outsider,” the next best option might be to place an ambitious pol such as Gingrich just a heartbeat away in the VP slot, positioned to take over, should a John Hinckley successfully take Trump out with a hot lead injection, or some other fatal “accident” befall him.

Gingrich is already being bandied about as a top consideration for Trump’s pick as vice president, appearing on several speculative “short lists” in stories from the Insider-run controlled media, from the New York Times to National Review. Among the important stories to float the Gingrich-as-VP idea is an article in National Review by Myra Adams on May 4 entitled, “A Trump-Gingrich Ticket: Brilliant or Crazy?”

“Gingrich is media savvy and a mega fundraising asset,” writes Adams. “He is good on the campaign trail and could solidify support among conservatives,” she insists, even though conservative voters have repeatedly rejected him. “Newt and Callista could even help rally Catholics,” Adams claims. Yes, in his latest incarnation, chameleon Gingrich — who has reinvented himself as often as rock diva Madonna — and third wife Callista pose as devout Catholics. But here’s the key part from National Review, aka Neocon Central: “Most important, Gingrich legitimizes Trump’s candidacy and would refine Trump’s somewhat unartful domestic and foreign-policy positions.” Get it? According to National Review, a principal conduit for channeling CFR globalist bilge to conservatives, Gingrich would “legitimize” Trump.

Moreover, says Adams: “A Trump-Gingrich ticket would send a strong signal that ‘Make America Great Again’ is not just a campaign slogan but the theme for a new Republican Revolution — with Newt Gingrich as its chief strategist.”

Naturally the Insiders never put all their eggs in one basket; Newt is not their only option to co-opt a Trump administration. And if Gingrich is not chosen for VP, he could still land  in some other top advisory position where he could guide the Trump administration in a suitably globalist direction. The highest Insider endorsement thus far for Trump comes from former Vice President Dick Cheney, who told CNN on May 6 he would be supporting the New York casino-real estate tycoon’s White House run. Cheney not only served as a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, but was captured by C-SPAN at a CFR function on video chortling with David Rockefeller and infamously boasting about how he had concealed his CFR membership from Wyoming voters, while pretending to be a conservative congressman serving the “Cowboy State.”

When Trump laid out his foreign policy ideas to the press on April 27 in Washington, D.C., only a handful of trusted advisors were invited to the event, according to the New York Times. They included Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and Zalmay Khalizad, the former Bush ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, both of whom are CFR members.

More telling than this, however, is Trump’s apparent esteem for Richard Haass, the president of the CFR and a member of the Trilateral Commission. During an appearance on the MSNBC show Morning Joe with co-host Mika Brzezinski (a CFR member), Trump praised Haass. Brzezinski, daughter of Trilateral Commission founding director (and CFR member) Zbigniew Brzezinski, asked: “Who do you respect on foreign policy? Who do you turn to? Who do you think is a great name?” Trump responded: “Well, I respect Richard Haass, who’s on your show a lot. And I like him a lot.”

Later that same day at the Republican debate in Detroit, when asked by Fox News moderator Brett Baier to list “two or three names that you trust for national security,” Trump responded, “I think Richard Haass is excellent. I have a lot of respect for him.” In the next breath, he said, “I think General Keane is excellent,” referring to General John M. “Jack” Keane, also a CFR member. For the first two names out of his mouth to be high-level CFR globalists is not a good sign. Worse still is the report that Trump met with Haass last year for a foreign policy briefing. According to the New York Times, CFR spokeswoman Iva Zoric confirmed that the Trump-Haass meeting took place last August.

Is Trump completely unaware of the CFR’s pernicious historical influence on American foreign and domestic policy and its extensive reach throughout American institutions? Is he completely ignorant of the many statements by Richard Haass, whom he finds so “excellent”? Perhaps he is unacquainted with the 2006 op-ed entitled “State sovereignty must be altered in globalized era,” which Haass penned for George Soros’ Project Syndicate. In it Haass declared that we must “rethink” and “redefine” sovereignty because “new mechanisms are needed for regional and global governance” and “states must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies.” Due to globalization, said Haass, “sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but … it needs to become weaker.” According to the CFR chief, we must choose between “an international system of either world government or anarchy.”

Now, giving Trump the most generous benefit of the doubt, it might be argued that as a preoccupied businessman and social gadfly he was merely drawing out of the hat names of prominent “experts” he’s seen on television, or names that have been given to him by other advisors. Haass and other CFR spokesmen are highly intelligent and articulate, after all, and to those who only follow them in a cursory manner and are unfamiliar with the CFR one-world agenda, they may seem impressive, even respectable. If that is the case, then Trump is dangerously naïve and can hardly be the super-well informed, totally committed opponent of the CFR-led New World Order that some of his most ardent supporters claim he is.

If Haass, Keane, Cheney, Gingrich, Norquist, and other CFR/Trilateral globalists start popping up in the Trump organization as advisors and/or potential Cabinet nominees, it will be a fairly reliable “clue” that either Trump has already been co-opted, or that maybe he isn’t the outsider he claims to be, after all.

Are we exaggerating the danger from the CFR/Trilateralist “network of power”? The late Admiral Chester Ward, who was a former Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Navy and a member of the CFR for 16 years, left the organization and denounced it as a clique of “one-world-global-government-ideologists” formed for the “purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government.” According to Admiral Ward, “This lust to surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of the membership.” Moreover, he said: “In the entire CFR lexicon, there is no term of revulsion carrying a meaning so deep as ‘America First.’” Ward’s charge in this regard has been borne out in spades, as evidenced by the ballistic brouhaha from the CFR’s mediameisters at CNN, the New York Times, National Review, etc. over Trump’s use of “America First” in his first foreign policy speech.

The authoritative exposé of the CFR by author James Perloff, The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline, bears out Admiral Ward’s scathing charges.

The Trilateral Commission (TC), to which Haass and many other CFR members belong, was founded in 1973 by uber-banker David Rockefeller, who was, at the time, the CFR’s chairman of the board. He retired from that active position in 1985, but has remained as honorary chairman ever since. The TC serves the same one-world agenda as the CFR, but has joined Asian, European, and Canadian one-world elites to its American globalists. The late Barry Goldwater referred to it as “David Rockefeller’s newest cabal.” “It is intended to be,” said the former Republican Party presidential candidate and author of Conscience of a Conservative, “the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States.”

In his 1979 memoir With No Apologies, Goldwater stated:

In my view the Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power — political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical.... What the Trilaterals truly intend is the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nation-states involved.... As managers and creators of the system they will rule the future.

And over the past four decades, they have pursued precisely that path. So-called free trade regimes such as NAFTA, CAFTA, WTO, EU (European Union), TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), and mass migration schemes, which both the United States and Europe are feeling the brunt of now, are key elements of that “seizing control.”

These are the real “Insiders.” They are not simply “insiders,” i.e., the usual “old boys network” of pedestrian powerbrokers who have dominated this or that public office or institution for a few years. They are a transgenerational cabal of immensely wealthy conspirators that has seized control of not only our government, but our financial, educational, and social institutions as well.

Of the CFR’s immense power in our federal government, New York Times writer Anthony Lukas noted in 1971:

When Henry Stimson — the group’s quintessential member — went to Washington in 1940 as [FDR’s] Secretary of War, he took with him John McCloy, who was to become Assistant Secretary in charge of personnel [as well as a member, director, and then chairman of the CFR]. McCloy has recalled: “Whenever we needed a man we thumbed through the roll of the Council members and put through a call to New York.” And over the years, the men McCloy called in turn called other Council members.

Indeed they did, and as more and more CFR members answered “the call” one administration after another filled up with the council’s “Wise Men,” as the council and its sycophants and allies in the CFR-aligned news media dubbed the members.

Richard Barnet, himself a CFR member, wrote in 1972 that “failure to be asked to be a member of the Council has been regarded for a generation as a presumption of unsuitability for high office in the national security bureaucracy.”

In a July 2009 speech at the CFR’s new Washington, D.C., headquarters, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to the CFR’s New York Pratt House headquarters as her “mother ship” and said she was so pleased that the organization has a big, new office just down the street in the nation’s capital so that she and other U.S. State Department officials won’t have so far to go “to be told what we should be doing and how we should think.” This incredible admission, like Dick Cheney’s, was captured on video and can be found online. Secretary Clinton was introduced at that CFR appearance by Richard Haass, who noted that this was her ninth appearance before the council. She has been back many times since then.

It’s very clear that the CFR elites regard Hillary as one of their own, even though she is not formally a member. (Her daughter, Chelsea, and husband, Bill, are members, however, and she undoubtedly will join too, when she deems it politically expedient). That means the globalists have the Democrat side sewn up, Sanders notwithstanding. But they always do everything possible to stack the deck so as to have both major parties under control. It seems apparent from the virtually unprecedented level of attacks by the CFR-aligned forces in politics, business, media, and academia against Donald Trump that they view him as too independent and unpredictable. Their direct assaults have been unable to stop him thus far, so they are attempting to swarm him, seduce him, and co-opt him.

However, they have another plan as well, to replace him at the Republican convention, or, if that fails, to run a prominent Republican against him in a third-party campaign. The top CFR choice for this task appears to be House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has been carefully groomed, vetted, and tutored — and boosted to prominence.

Among the main figures leading the charge in this regard is CFR Senior Fellow Max Boot, an influential Republican neocon one-worlder. “The risk of Trump winning, however remote, represents the biggest national security threat that the United States faces today,” said Boot, in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on May 8.

According to CFR neoconservative Boot, “Hillary Clinton is a centrist Democrat who is more hawkish than President Obama and far more principled and knowledgeable about foreign affairs than Trump.... For all her shortcomings (and there are many), Clinton would be far preferable to Trump.”

But he prefers the third-party option “because a third-party candidate could take away votes from Trump and make clear that he is not an authentic voice of conservatism.” Yes, he sees himself and CFR-approved neocons, such as Ryan, as the “authentic voice of conservatism.”

“There is,” says Boot, “no shortage of Republican leaders today — the most prominent is House Speaker Paul D. Ryan — who represent Reaganesque conservatism.” The much-reported “truce” between Ryan and Trump, following their May 12 meeting, should not be viewed as anything other than temporary strategic positioning. Get ready for the globalist gambit to toss or turn Trump.