Administration Insiders: Pentagon House Cleaning of Never Trumpers Looms

[Burnt Reynolds 5,058]

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/02/26/administration-insiders-pentagon-house-cleaning-of-never-trumpers-looms/

Quote

 

President Trump’s firing of John Rood, the top policy official at the Pentagon, is a sign the agency is not immune from an effort to purge from influential positions across the administration “snakes” who do not support the president, according to four current and former officials.

Rood had been on the chopping block for months, but his firing just last week amid a spate of other personnel changes shows that the president is finally ready to clean house at a department that has tried to distance itself from politics, they said.

“All of them are getting tossed,” a senior administration official told Breitbart News. “You’re either on the team or you’re out, everywhere.”

Political appointees like Rood serve the administration and at the president’s prerogative. However, it was well-known at the Pentagon and beyond that Rood was not a supporter of the president.

“Plenty of people from the transition and at the National Security Council knew Rood was not playing on the same team as the president when it came to policy or personnel,” a defense official told Breitbart News after his firing. “Complaints have made it to the highest levels at the White House for awhile now.”

At at least two meetings he held for staff, Rood spoke profusely and glowingly about the late Sen. John McCain, but did not once mention the president, according to the defense official.

At his first town hall, he spoke about attending McCain’s funeral in Arizona and how Amber Alert signs on the highway were flashing in memorial for McCain, and how much both he and the American people loved him.

The second town hall was after Mattis issued his resignation letter. That evening, he called an all-hands meeting and spoke of how great Mattis was, how he was a man of honor like McCain, and what a privilege it was to work with Mattis. He then passed around copies of Mattis’s resignation letter and said that the Pentagon would continue implementing Mattis’s defense strategy.

“Never once mentioned Trump,” the defense official said. “The message was clearly Mattis and McCain are great and our president isn’t.”

But it was not just Rood’s dislike of the president that did him in. The current and former officials said Rood slow-rolled implementing the president’s defense policies on practically everything.

“Name it,” said one administration official, when asked which policies he slow-rolled.

One former administration official told Breitbart News the U.S. could have done a lot more to help Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, but that Rood effectively stopped it. The former official also said Rood slow-rolled pressuring South Korea and Japan to pay more for the stationing of U.S. troops there — a top priority of the president’s.

CNN — who first noted Rood’s departure — reported that Rood was skeptical about peace talks with the Taliban as well as the president’s decision to scale down military exercises with South Korea during talks with North Korea.

The New York Times reported that Rood also clashed with the president on his designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization. The Washington Post reported that Rood was reluctant to provide the White House with plans for a possible withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria.

CNN and other outlets reported that Rood’s firing may have had something to do with his support for military assistance for Ukraine, which the White House temporarily froze last year. But the Pentagon has publicly pushed back hard against that notion.

“John Rood was the most anti-Trump person in the Trump administration,” the former administration official said. “He openly worked to oppose the president’s policies. He was running his own policy irrespective of the president’s views.“

 

 

This is only a portion of the article, I suggest the entire thing as its a good read. Cleaning house is WAY overdue. 

 

This is one of the most frustrating parts of the Trump administration for me, the fact that he's brought people into his administration that clearly don't share his policy views, which has only served to undermine him. 

 

Similarly, frustrations with the GOP Senate is their establishment derived corruption, which has similarly slowed Trump's ability to get his people into his cabinet since they require Senate confirmation.

 

By now he's clearly figured out that he shouldn't have neocons in his cabinet. I won't stop drumming about Pompeo.. he presents himself as a pro-Trump guy but he's a warmongering neocon (if it quacks like a duck.. my fear came true re: John Bolton and others), one of the last few left in the administration, and his presence, even if he turns out to be "pro Trump", will never not make me nervous. 

 

I also think its worth speculating WHY Trump waited so long to clean house: I think most of us would agree that he should've cleaned house in January 2017. However, that was also when he realized he was being investigated. He knew bad things were happening, people were trying to overthrow him, then before he could be situated the Mueller/counsel thing came up, which likely also prevented cleaning house as well. A natural inclination to do so would clearly be seen as "Nixon-like panic" and spun into something to justify perhaps an invocation of the 25th.

 

Much like with the delays in the "wall" not being due to Trump breaking promises, but clear obstruction/endless lawsuits/injunctions, I think logical people can see Trump's progress on promises not "fully kept" as a success, and overt attempts to follow through on his promises. He's still trying to get a cabinet that agrees with his approach, and can pass the corrupt Senate's confirmation process. An elected President deserves a cabinet/executive government he runs that he wants.

Edited February 26, 2020 by Burnt Reynolds