Here were the promises that Trump made to us (progressives):

In his campaign’s 21 March 2023 “Agenda47: President Trump’s Plan to Dismantle the Deep State and Return Power to the American People”, Trump said (and you can see and hear him say it by clicking onto that):

Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is.

First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.

Second, we will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them. The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies, which they’re doing now at a level that nobody can believe even possible.

Third, we will totally reform FISA courts which are so corrupt that the judges seemingly do not care when they are lied to in warrant applications. So many judges have seen so many applications that they know were wrong, or at least they must have known. They do nothing about it, they’re lied to.

Fourth, to expose the hoaxes and abuses of power that have been tearing our country apart, we will establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and corruption, and there are plenty of them.

Fifth, we will launch a major crackdown on government leakers who collude with the fake news to deliberately weave false narratives and to subvert our government and our democracy. When possible, we will press criminal charges.

Sixth, we will make every Inspector General’s Office independent and physically separated from the departments they oversee so they do not become the protectors of the Deep State.

Seventh, I will ask Congress to establish an independent auditing system to continually monitor our intelligence agencies to ensure they are not spying on our citizens or running disinformation campaigns against the American people, or that they are not spying on someone’s campaign like they spied on my campaign.

Eighth, we will continue the effort launched by the Trump administration to move parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington Swamp. Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado, as many as 100,000 government positions can be moved out. And I mean immediately out of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America, and they really do love America.

Ninth, I will work to ban federal bureaucrats from taking jobs at the companies they deal with and that they regulate. So they deal with these companies and they regulate these companies and then they want to take jobs from these companies. Doesn’t work that way—such a public display cannot go on and it’s taking place all the time, like with Big Pharma.

Finally [tenth], I will push a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress.

This is how I will shatter the deep state and restore government that is controlled by the people and for the people.

Then, in his 19 July 2023 entitled 36-second Trump Social video, he said (which likewise sounds more like progressive democratic political left, than anything right wing):

“This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expell the war-mongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists Marxists and fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country, we will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains, once and for all.”

On October 30th, I headlined “The Top People Who Lead the Hiring for the Next Trump Administration” and said that “the fact that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who quit his own U.S. Presidential campaign and simultaneously endorsed (and was praised by) Trump, is NOT a part of his transition team; combined with the fact that at those joint events RFK Jr. was arguing AGAINST Trump’s now-apparent intention to CUT the regulatory agencies INSTEAD OF (as Kennedy has always urged) terminatethe revolving-door between them and the corporations that they ‘regulate’, does, at the very least, suggest that Kennedy has been conned by Trump and should therefore promptly inform Trump that he is considering to withdraw his endorsement, for that very reason. If Kennedy will warn Trump that he’s considering to do this, because Kennedy is being excludedfrom that operation, then the decision will be Trump’s as to whether he’ll correct that error, or instead go down to defeat. Listen to that speech by Kennedy, and … you will know that it’s like oil and water between the two of them, on the entire issue of corruption and regulation.”

FURTHERMORE: Trump’s foreign-affairs and national-security picks to-date have all been neoconservatives who are rabidly against China and Iran and who oppose continuing America’s ownership of Ukraine ever since February 2014 not because they are anti-imperialists (and therefore anti-neoconservative) as a progressive is, but instead because they want to redirect that immense weapons-spending to target against (and engage in a “New Cold War” against and then provoke a hot war with) both China and Iran. On November 11th, Trump selected one of those rabid neoconservatives, Mike Waltz, to be his National Security Advisor. Here is what the website “Florida Politics” said about this extreme neocon:

https://floridapolitics.com/archives/419663-michael-waltz-we-are-in-a-cold-war-with-the-chinese-communist-party/

https://web.archive.org/web/20231211195946/https://floridapolitics.com/archives/419663-michael-waltz-we-are-in-a-cold-war-with-the-chinese-communist-party/

“Michael Waltz: We are in a cold war with the Chinese Communist Party”

14 April 2021

‘They are certainly in one with us,’ Waltz said.

Republican U.S. Rep. Michael Waltz said Tuesday that the United States is in a cold war with the Chinese Communist Party waged globally and tactically in small theaters like the Panama Canal and the mountains of western Argentina.

Waltz has grown increasingly vocal with hawkish views of the American relationship with China, joining two other Florida Republicans, Sen. Rick Scott and MarcoRubio, in a drumbeat of criticism and alarm over China’s agenda and means to counter American global power. Scott earlier had declared he believes the United States and China arein a cold war, akin to the 45-year dangerous rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Rubio has been almost as hawkish but hasn’t quite used the words “cold war” yet to describe the relationship.

Waltz has now.

“We are, I believe, in a cold war with the Chinese Community Party. They are certainly in one with us,” Waltz said as the guest speaker at a U.S. Global Leadership Coalition Zoom conference on foreign affairs, for military veterans.

“As a country, we need to get on that footing,” Waltz said. “It’s not just a whole-of-a-government response. It’s a whole-of-society response. When we look at things that are happening in the technology, space, in our universities, in our capital markets, where the Chinese are rapidly pulling ahead, and talking about, openly, replacing the American Dream and American leadership around the world with the Chinese Dream and Chinese leadership.”

Waltz is a Green Beret combat veteran, a former senior policy adviser in the Pentagon, and currently a colonel in the Army National Guard.

In his comments to the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, he also expressed his commitment to diplomacy and to American spending to support diplomatic efforts and development around the world, provided they are backed by American military strength.

Waltz expressed strong concerns about the United Nations’ efforts, and President Joe Biden‘s support for them, to create a new balance of power in Afghanistan involving the Taliban.

He also expressed his observation that in countries that encourage the education of girls and empowerment of women, women thrive in the society and economy, while “extremism does not.” He noted he is Co-Chair of the House’s Women, Peace and Security Caucus “with one of the more liberal members of Congress,” Democratic Rep. Lois Frankel of West Palm Beach.

But it was China that got Waltz rolling Tuesday. He called for a broader and deeper response to the Chinese government that he said is not only pushing toward world dominance but is in many ways being bankrolled by American capitalism happy to seek profits there. That has to stop, he said.

Waltz said China, in part using money raised from America, has bought up ports in Panama and is in position to control access to both sides of the canal, or at least to control access to the commercial infrastructure. “While I was down there, one of our frigates, wanted to — at least as I was told — wanted to stop in for repairs, and was denied,” Waltz said.

He said China was able to leverage debts from the Argentinian government to gain control of a mountain range. Now China has placed a satellite tracking station in those mountains that is in line with the polar-orbital routes used by the American military for launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

“They’re doing this around the world, with ports, with grids, with key terrain as they expand their presence in space, on both sides of the Suez Canal as well, buying into both of those free trade zones, so they are using economic tools to seize critical terrain that has key military applications,” Waltz said.

The plan regarding China is to send enough weapons to Taiwan so that it can declare itself NOT to be a part of China, in order to provoke China to invade so that America can then go directly to war against China —though America’s official policy ever since 1972 is and has been that “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.”

Rick Scott, who is the wealthiest of all U.S. Senators and extremely corrupt, is being heavily lobbied to become the replacement for Mitch McConnell as the leader of the U.S. Senate — and Trump hasn’t done anything to dissuade Republican Senators from voting for Scott. Marco Rubio is widely reported to be Trump’s likely pick to become U.S. Secretary of State to replace the neocon Antony Blinken. So: they’re all neocons — just as during Trump’s first Administration. Only the names have changed — to protect the guilt (Trump’s).

This is Trump’s way to “Make America Great Again”? No, it is his way to make America’s billionaires even fatter-with-wealth than they already are.

I have expressed concern to RFK Jr. — with whom I’ve had a number of policy-oriented email conversations — that Trump doesn’t include him in his transition team to select Cabinet-heads etc.; I’ve even asked him “Was he just using you as decoration?”; but I have gotten no answer from him.

It seems to me that Trump’s progessive promises were just as insincere as were the Democratic Party’s ever since at least 1992. Neither Party really cares about anyone but its megadonors. American democracy now is as phony as a $3 bill. Short of a 2nd American Revolution, the totalitarian, purely aristocratic-ruled, U.S. regime, will only become tighter, until it chokes the entire world.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

END OF ERIC ZUESSE CONTRIBUTION TO THIS DOSSIER.