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Trump Battles the Globalists of Both Parties
Before heading to Cleveland to accept the Republican nomination for president, Donald Trump paid a high-profile visit to Capitol Hill, where he hoped to unify Congressional Republicans behind his presidential campaign. Many of the 247 Republican Representatives and 54 Senators were cordial to their party’s presumptive nominee, but others remained hostile and weren’t shy about expressing it to reporters after leaving the closed-door meetings.
One Congressman reportedly demanded that Trump promise to protect Congress’ Article I powers if he is elected. Trump tactfully refrained from pointing out how many times the Republican Congress has unilaterally surrendered its Article I powers, including the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”
Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona openly mocked Trump at the meeting and then bragged to reporters about their “tense” exchange. Flake, an unrepentant member of the Gang of Eight that produced the 2013 amnesty bill, has already announced plans to resurrect that discredited bill next year no matter who is elected president.
Trump’s next stop was a private meeting with Senator Ted Cruz, who inappropriately brought his campaign manager Jeff Roe to the meeting. Two months after suspending his campaign, why does Cruz still utilize a high-priced campaign manager to join high-level discussions with the presumptive nominee?
The answer is that Cruz never stopped running for president, and the people who spent $158 million — more than twice what Trump spent — to back Cruz in 2016 are not going away. Cruz recently set up two new nonprofit organizations to keep his key people employed, prematurely launching another run for president in 2020.
Cruz’s delays in endorsing Trump and his disloyal preparations to run for president in 2020 help only one person: Hillary Clinton. That’s what some Republican mega-donors actually prefer, because they are globalists who oppose Trump’s stances against immigration and free trade.
The globalists will never accept Trump or anyone else who puts Americans first, and they are using Cruz to undermine Trump’s campaign. Cruz’s mega-donors think they can buy their way to control of the Republican Party even if Trump wins the presidency this year, and they are already funding the takeover of several conservative organizations.
These globalist money-men are also hostile to our Constitution, which they want to rewrite in a new constitutional convention, also called “Convention of States.” Eric O’Keefe, who has close ties to the billionaire Koch brothers, backs the
Never Trump movement and is a board member of the Convention of States project.
Justice Scalia in May 2015 called this attempt for a new constitutional convention a “horrible idea,” but several of its cheerleaders were able to get on the Republican platform committee. Cruz has praised the delusional proposal to add many amendments to the Constitution, and some of his donors are part of the same group that seeks to alter our Constitution.
Cruz earned support by many conservatives when he first came to D.C. four years ago. It is long overdue for Cruz to repudiate the support of these globalists who are working against Trump and against our national sovereignty.
“We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism,” Trump promised in his April 27 foreign policy speech in Washington. That sentiment is anathema to the globalists who provide much of the money for Republican candidates.
“I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down,” Trump continued. “Under my administration, we will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs. Americans must know that we’re putting the American people first again.”
When Trump vows to “put Americans first” the globalists complain about “protectionism,” as if there’s something wrong with expecting our own government to protect American jobs and America’s economic interests.
“On trade, on immigration, on foreign policy, the jobs, incomes and security of the American worker will always be my first priority,” Trump said. “Both our friends and our enemies put their countries above ours, and we — while being fair to them — must start doing the same.”
In a June 22 speech in New York, Trump intensified his attack on the globalist money interests: “We’ll never be able to fix a rigged system by counting on the same people who have rigged it in the first place. The insiders wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power and in the money.”
“It’s not just the political system that’s rigged, it’s the whole economy,” Trump continued. “It’s rigged by big donors who want to keep wages down. It’s rigged by big businesses who want to leave our country, fire our workers, and sell their products back into the United States with absolutely no consequences for them.”
We’ve waited a long time for a Republican candidate to express these pro-American views, but Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential primaries proves they are what the voters want to hear.
Brexit Stuns the Globalists
Britain’s decision to “leave” the European Union (EU) ended the career of Prime Minister David Cameron, who had campaigned hard to “remain” in that supranational body of unelected bureaucrats. Small-c conservatives in Cameron’s own Conservative Party rebelled against the liberals and globalists who dominate both major parties over there. Sound familiar?
Everyone agrees that Donald Trump is the big winner of the vote. As the New York Times conceded, the “leave” voters are “eerily similar to Donald Trump’s followers, motivated by many of the same frustrations and angers.”
Trump, who just happened to land in Britain as the results were announced, was quick to draw the obvious parallels. He promised that “Americans will have a chance to vote for trade, immigration and foreign policies that put our citizens first. They will have the chance to reject today’s rule by the global elite.”
Imagine if the Republican Party were stuck with yet another Bush as its presumptive nominee instead of Donald J. Trump. From the first George Bush’s foolish declaration of a “new world order” on September 11, 1990 to the second George Bush’s obsessive attempts to promote economic integration within the Western Hemisphere, the Bush family is committed to a globalist ideology which the English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic have firmly rejected.
Soon after he became president, George W. Bush traveled to Quebec City in April 2001 where he called for “hemispheric integration” — in other words an economic union, like the European Union, for 34 countries of the Western Hemisphere. Bush committed his administration to negotiating a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) that would become effective no later than 2005.
When his grand vision of hemispheric integration was foiled by the rise of anti-American rulers in Venezuela and Bolivia, Bush repackaged his globalism in the form of a North American union, which he launched in Waco, Texas in March 2005. That meeting of the “three amigos” had the goal of expanding NAFTA from merely a “free trade” agreement to closer political union among the three countries of North America (the United States, Canada and Mexico).
The specter of a North American Union, modeled on the European Union, was aggressively pushed by one of the three amigos, Mexican President Vicente Fox, who recently was back in the news for using a vulgar epithet against Donald Trump. Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley wrote of Fox: “There is one voice north of the Rio Grande that supports his vision. To wit, this newspaper.”
The Bush-Fox vision of a unified North America was given glossy support by numerous think tanks including the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) whose 70-page report, Building a North American Community, called for “the extension of full labor mobility to Mexico.” (See the July 2005 Phyllis Schlafly Report.) The CFR report was co-authored by Senator Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi, who wrote: “I support the Task Force report and its recommendations.”
Given his support for “full labor mobility” between the United States and the corrupt, violent, drug-trafficking nation across our southern border, it’s no wonder that Bush was also an advocate of “comprehensive immigration reform,” i.e., giving amnesty to millions of illegal Mexican immigrants, which our Congress wisely rejected in 2006, 2007 and 2013. Among the British people who voted to leave the European Union, the biggest reason was the EU’s complete failure to control the flood of immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
The powerful “breaking point” poster was widely distributed by the campaign to “leave” the EU. The poster showed an actual photograph of Europe’s insecure border at its weakest point in Slovenia, showing a column of thousands of illegal immigrants, extending far off in the distance as far as the eye can see, with the caption: “The EU has failed us all. We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.”
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) recalled that the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of Great Britain was an early sign of the 1980 wave that swept Ronald Reagan into the White House. “Now it’s our time,” Sessions said, to defeat “the establishment forces, the global powers” that “want to erode borders, rapidly open America’s markets to foreign produced goods, while having little interest in advancing America’s ability to sell abroad.”
Trump’s Speech Trumped Cruz’s
Donald Trump’s thrilling acceptance speech proved that his vision, not Ted Cruz’s, is the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Trump hit the right notes in his powerful call to put America first, while Cruz’s presentation to the convention the night before was thin on conservative substance.
Cruz diminished his chances of becoming a future standard-bearer, not merely by failing to endorse Trump, but also by failing to embrace the conservative policies that are necessary to make America great again. It was Trump, not Cruz, who succeeded in fulfilling Ronald Reagan’s goal of “raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people.”
Trump repeatedly and passionately demonstrated in his acceptance speech that he would stand up for Americans and do everything in his power to end the exploitation of the United States by the rest of the world. “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo!” Trump declared, adding that “the American people will come first once again.”
As Trump did throughout the campaign, he led on the fundamental issues of immigration, trade, and restoring respect for America around the world. While his rivals eventually followed his lead, it was Trump who framed the issues and forced the media to pay attention to them.
Trump explained in a compelling way the harm resulting from crime by illegal aliens. He described how he personally met with the family members of a young woman with a promising future who had been killed by an illegal alien, who was then released and still remains at large in our country.
“We must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism,” Trump declared. “Anyone who endorses violence, hatred or oppression is not welcome in our country. Americans want relief from uncontrolled immigration. Yet Hillary Clinton is proposing mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness.”
On jobs, the Republican Party since the 1990s supported free trade deals that have cost American workers dearly. Trump has single-handedly converted our Party into one that is now pro-American-worker. “I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals,” Trump declared during his speech. “These are the forgotten men and women of our country . . . who work hard but no longer have a voice.”
“I am your voice,” Trump then said, amid thunderous applause. For the first time since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has a nominee who actually represents the average American worker. Trump extolled “the dignity of work and the dignity of working people.” He brings back to the Republican Party the “bricklayers, carpenters, and electricians” whom he said his father was most comfortable being with.
Trump observed that “America has lost nearly one-third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997,” and that NAFTA was “one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country.” “Never again,” Trump added, promising “a new fair trade policy that protects our jobs and stands up to countries that cheat.”
In contrast, Ted Cruz’s speech at the convention made only passing references to immigration and trade, without the substance or the passion that Trump expressed. Instead Cruz repeated “freedom” over and over, some 23 times, declaring that “America is an ideal,” and that the ideal is merely that “freedom matters.”
Cruz’s speech reflected the views of his mega-donors, who tend to be more libertarian than the conservative views of the average American. Leaving people alone to do whatever they like is not enough to restore the United States to military superiority or economic independence, or to achieve the many other goals set forth in the Republican Party platform.
Cruz’s vision is not that of Ronald Reagan, who made the United States stronger and more prosperous as Trump vows to do. Trump emphasized in his speech his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he said “will not only destroy our manufacturing, but it will make America subject to the rulings of foreign governments.”
Trump even pledged “to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers, or that diminishes our freedom and independence.” Cruz made no such pledge and failed to mention the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Trump obviously meant every word in his electrifying speech, as when he expressed his genuine outrage at how “big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of [Hillary Clinton] because they know she will keep our rigged system in place.”
Speaking of Hillary’s record as Secretary of State, Trump denounced “her bad instincts and her bad judgment. After fifteen years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before.” Trump concluded, “We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Syria.”
Cruz’s speech had no such criticism of Hillary, and relied on superficial rhetorical devices like devoting much of his speech to a story about a sympathetic victim with whom Cruz had no personal connection. The shortcoming of Ted Cruz is not only his failure to endorse the Republican Party nominee. The greater flaw is that, like Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and others in the Republican Establishment, Cruz has failed to embrace the conservative vision that Donald Trump stands for.
Trump Is Right About NATO
Donald Trump created a firestorm last month when he called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “obsolete” and suggested that the U.S. obligation to defend the borders of NATO’s 28 member countries should depend on whether those countries “fulfill their obligations to us.” In a series of columns written in 1997, 1998, and 1999, Phyllis Schlafly opposed NATO’s expansion to Eastern Europe. Excerpts from those columns appear below:
All during the Cold War, NATO had a precise mission: to prevent the Soviets from invading Western Europe. NATO’s job is finished; the Berlin Wall is history; all hands should be awarded medals and retired.
NATO is now a bureaucracy in search of a new mission. A deafening drumbeat is now demanding that NATO be put on life support by admitting the former Warsaw Pact countries to membership. The biggest question is, why should Americans commit to defend faraway European borders that have been the locus of ethnic, nationalist and religious disputes for hundreds of years? Make no mistake: NATO is a life-and-death U.S. promise to go to war to protect any of the other members.
We are now seeing a powerful push to keep America on an interventionist course despite the opposition of the American people. It’s called “global leadership,” which means that our armed services will serve as global policemen and global social workers, while the U.S. taxpayers will play global sugar daddy.
The chief advocate for NATO expansion is Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s personal foreign policy adviser and Rhodes scholar roommate. The recipient of the 1993 Norman Cousins Global Governance Award, Talbott’s world view calls for birthing what he calls “the global nation” to replace national sovereignty. President Bill Clinton made the NATO Expansion Treaty his primary foreign policy objective in his State of the Union Message.
NATO was the linchpin of the Cold War strategy to scare the old Soviet Union out of invading Western Europe. It succeeded. Nobody is worried any longer about Soviet troops marching into Western Europe.
The NATO Expansion Treaty would be a profound change in that mission. It is a life-and-death commitment to go to war to defend Eastern European borders, which ethnic factions have been fighting about for a thousand years. All those borders were established as a result of bloody battles. There is nothing sacred about them, and there is no reason why America should promise to go to war to preserve them.
When Madeleine Albright testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, she admitted that this treaty commits us to defend not only the borders, but the NATO-defined “interests” of Eastern Europe. She urged that NATO extend its geographic reach beyond Europe to “the Middle East to Central Africa.”
The NATO Treaty means that NATO, not Congress, will decide when America goes to war. It will inflict us with one “Bosnia” after another, using our Armed Services as global policemen and global social workers in costly conflicts that are none of America’s business. The NATO Treaty is a repudiation of Ronald Reagan’s successful strategy of peace through strength, and its replacement by the Clinton-Albright strategy of repeatedly using our military forces under NATO or UN command.
The NATO Treaty also repudiates George Washington’s advice “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” and instead commits us to permanent involvement in foreign conflicts.
Behind the orchestrated propaganda for NATO Expansion is the $51 million that U.S. weapons contractors have spent on lobbying in the last two years. U.S. weapons manufacturers, which expect to make billions of dollars selling arms and military equipment to the new NATO nations, have funneled an additional $32.3 million to Congressional candidates. This political money went equally to Republicans and Democrats, which explains why support for NATO Expansion is “bipartisan.”
The U.S. weapons industry has already protected itself against the inability or unwillingness of the new NATO countries to fulfill their commitments. In 1996, the U.S. arms industry lobbied a bill through Congress to force American taxpayers to guarantee loans for weapons exports.
The NATO Expansion Treaty will put NATO-U.S. troops right along the border of Russia, and Russia sees that as, at best, a diplomatic slap in the face, and, at worst, a military threat. The Clinton Administration has repeatedly stated that the first round “will not be the last.” The Senate vote is not just about Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, but is just as much about Romania, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and all the countries that are queuing up to cash in on America’s financial generosity and military commitments.
Western Europe, which has grown wealthy on U.S. handouts over the past 50 years, is today’s “welfare queen.” The Senate should reject the NATO Expansion Treaty and terminate welfare for foreigners now.