Why a Second Trump Term May Turn Out to be a Dud

DC is still a swamp of corruption and stagnation

Donald Trump‘s historic presidential comeback on November 5, 2024 has many political observers waiting anxiously for his inauguration on January 20, 2025. Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 were symbolic rejections of the prevailing neoconservative/neoliberal order in Washington. In both instances, Trump campaigned on the taboo subjects of immigration restriction, foreign policy restraint, and economic nationalism. In doing so, Trump challenged the sacraments of the liberal international order.

For individuals who were intimately involved in the anti-establishment campaigns of presidential candidates such as Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, there was initially a degree of cautious optimism about Trump. While not ideologically perfect, Trump’s platform at least challenged the neoconservative foreign policy consensus and represented an incremental step towards retrenchment.

The first Trump administration ended up being a mixed bag due to his focus on passing conventional conservative reforms such as nominating conservative Supreme Court justices and tax cuts. The former at least yielded decent reforms such as the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the NYSRPA v. Bruen decision that liberalized gun rights nationwide, and the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College that ended affirmative action in college admissions.

That said, on the key issues of restricting mass migration and rolling back the perpetual warfare state, Trump left a lot to be desired. No genuine immigration legislation was passed — abolishing birthright citizenship, implementing an immigration moratorium, passing E-Verify, and/or scrapping chain migration — and the United States’ foreign policy apparatus and agenda stayed intact, albeit without a new war breaking out.

In effect, Trump’s first administration was a generic Republican presidency. Now, the million-dollar question is: Will Trump’s second administration be a repeat of the first? From the looks of Trump’s cabinet appointments, we’re in store for a generic Republican administration. Let’s take a peep:

1. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State

Marco Rubio is a consummate GOP establishment hack. The Florida Senator is a wily politician who knows how to deftly ride political waves. Elected at the height of the Tea Party era in 2010, Rubio initially marketed himself as a Tea Party conservative who would work to lower the size of the government. But once in office, Rubio became another generic hawkish Republican who pushed for regime change in Libya and Syria, while also calling for conflicts against emerging regional powers such as China, Iran, and Russia.

During his failed presidential run in the 2015 Republican primaries, Rubio received the support of the late-casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Even after getting bested by Donald Trump in a humiliating manner during the 2016 election cycle, Rubio continued his regime change advocacy in the US Senate, most noteworthy, his efforts to realize regime change in countries such as Iran and Venezuela. With Rubio receiving a promotion to the Secretary of State position, he will faithfully continue the ruling class’s interventionist agenda

Like most neoconservatives and other leaders adjacent to those circles, Rubio has previously been a booster for mass migration, and was an integral part of the so-called Gang of Eight bipartisan group of Senators trying to pass amnesty during the Obama era.

Rest assured, as Secretary of State, Rubio will likely continue the Judeo-American empire’s policy of policing the globe and destabilizing countries who dare challenge “our greatest ally” in Israel.

2. Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary

Former Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth’s nomination to serve as Defense Secretary will give the Pentagon a much more youthful and virile look, at least superficially. Donning a Deus Vult tattoo and not afraid to give woke leftists verbal lashings, Hegseth’s goal is to inject new energy into a Defense Department beleaguered by falling recruitment numbers in all branches of the US military.

Hegseth is a vocal opponent of the military’s woke turn and has been highly critical of putting women in combat roles and wants the military to be prepared for the era of Great Power competition.

However, underneath Hegseth’s bombastic exterior is just another generic Republican. Like many Republicans in the Trump era, Hegseth talks a big game about avoiding never-ending wars, but sounds and moves like a typical hawk on foreign policy issues concerning Iran and China.

It’s often forgotten that at the height of the Iraq War, Hegseth thanked Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for his support of the United States’ ill-fated regime change venture. Moreover, during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, Hegseth called on the United States to remain the “world’s sheriff.”

Following the first Trump administration’s assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani at the start of 2020, Hegseth called for Trump to follow up with a vicious bombing campaign against Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear installations, and ports. His blood lust towards Iran did not end there. From his Fox News armchair, Hegseth encouraged Trump to bomb Iranian hospitals, mosques, and schools should circumstances necessitate it.

Like most of his Evangelical Christian cohort, Hegseth is a fanatic pro-Israel proponent. “This is not some mystical land that can be dismissed. It’s the story of God’s chosen people. That story didn’t end in 1776 or in 1948 or with the founding of the UN. All of these things still resonate and matter today,” Hegseth said when he was interviewed by the Jewish Press in 2016.

Hegeth’s unhinged Zionism was on full display during his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 14, 2025, when he was grilled about what Israel has to do to end the Gaza conflict. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) asked Hegseth if he views himself as a Christian Zionist, to which Hegseth responded:

“I’m a Christian, and I robustly support the State of Israel and its existential defense, and the way America comes alongside them as their great ally. I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.”

The soon to be Defense Secretary has also caught the anti-China virus contaminating the halls of the DC Swamp. Hegseth maintains that China is “building an army specifically dedicated to defeating the United States of America.” Hegseth added that China has “a full spectrum, long-term view of not just regional, but global domination,” and has designs to “corner the market completely on the technological future.”

Hegseth is clearly towing the national security state line of pursuing a great power conflict with China. With Hegseth as defense chief, do not expect the United States to fully retrench from global affairs like many American voters fed up with the foreign policy status quo want to.

3. Pam Bondi, Attorney General

Trump’s nomination of Pam Bondi to serve as United States Attorney General should worry both First Amendment and Second Amendment supporters. For one, Bondi has already pushed for the revocation of visas of students protesting Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.

"The thing that's really the most troubling to me [are] these students in universities in our country, whether they're here as Americans or if they're here on student visas, and they're out there saying 'I support Hamas,'" she said in an interview with Newsmax in 2023. "Frankly they need to be taken out of our country or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away,” Bondi added.

On gun rights, Bondi has a suspect track record. When she served as Florida Attorney General, Bondi went public about her support for red flag gun confiscation orders. Red flag orders allow law enforcement to confiscate firearms from individuals who are suspected of posing a threat to themselves or other people — all without any form of due process

At a press conference on the heels of the Parkland mass shooting of 2018, Bondi was sitting next to then-President Donald Trump where she revealed “We’re going to bring in something called the gun violence restraining order” that will allow “law enforcement [to] come in and take the guns.”

In time, then-Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) signed SB 7026, a bill which established a bump stock ban, raised the age individuals could buy a gun, and codified red flag gun confiscation orders as law in Florida. Bondi threw her support behind this blatantly unconstitutional legislation, declaring “This bill is not perfect... it's simply the right thing to do.”

4. Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security

Kristi Noem, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, can be counted on to play ball for team Israel. Back in March, Noem signed a bill into law that lumps some critiques of the state of Israel with antisemitism. Noem’s signing of this bill has made the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism the standard for all investigations of unfair or discriminatory practices dealing with Jewish individuals or organizations taking place in South Dakota.

Noem rationalized her signing of this bill on the premise that it would allegedly guarantee the “security of God’s chosen people.” week.

Like most of her Republican counterparts, Noem is allergic to using state power to combat cultural degeneracy. When Tucker Carlson was a primetime host on Fox News, he grilled Noem on her decision to partially veto a bill that would prohibit transgender athletes who were born male from participating in women’s sports, he accused Noem of caving to the NCAA.

Noem is very much wedded to serving corporate actors under the pretext of abiding by “limited government” principles. In a similar vein, Noem resettled so-called “refugees” in South Dakota throughout 2020.

As the head of DHS, Noem can be counted on to go after so-called extremists i.e. pro-Palestinian activists and other enemies of organized Jewry. In fairness, some deportations will occur under her watch, especially those of violent criminals. However, like most Republican programs implemented in Empire Judaica, they merely place a handbrake on trends that have already been in motion for multiple decades.

The best-case scenario we’ll see here are slight reductions in the amount of foreigners entering the country both legally and illegally. America’s demographic replacement will continue albeit at a slightly slower rate.

So much for upholding the security of the homeland.

5. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Secretary of Labor

Trump’s Secretary of Labor nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer was one of the few Republicans willing to work with Democrats to pass amnesty in Congress. For example, Chavez-DeRemer backed a visa worker giveaway that was snuck into a 493-page bill. This legislation would increase the number of foreign migrants being brought into displace Americans in white-collar professions.

On top of that, this legislation would reward green cards to visa workers who have been employed in American jobs or studying in the United States for 10 years. In effect, this bill would have created a system of indentured servitude that would grant countless businesses the ability to pay visa holders with green cards — as opposed to paying them a regular wage — provided they work for 10 years in the United States.

Moreover, when the Biden regime issued an executive amnesty in June 2024 that allowed roughly 550,000 illegal alien spouses and children of American citizens to obtain green cards and an eventual pathway to American citizenship, Chavez-DeRemer voted with 14 House Republicans and 202 House Democrats to block this measure.

Although Chavez-DeRemer has made positive gestures towards Big Labor organizations like the Teamsters, any form of pro-worker advocacy would go to waste should her pro-mass migration track record continue to guide her policymaking as the head of the Labor Department. After all, mass migration is the mortal enemy of blue-collar workers due to its proven tendency of depressing worker wages.

6. Mike Waltz, National Security Adviser

Mike Waltz is another hawk with questionable views on a host of geopolitical issues. Waltz has been an enthusiastic support of increased defense spending. In 2021, Waltz told the Jerusalem Insider in 2021 that the United States can’t afford to slash defense spending because it would negatively impact the United States’ ability to “deter and compete with China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and global terrorism.”

In an op-ed he published in 2023, Waltz cranked up the fearmongering with respect to Russia declaring that if Russia defeated Ukraine on the battlefield, it would then proceed to attack NATO member nations and kick off World War III.

Waltz is not a principled non-interventionist on Russia. For one, he believes that further US aid should be “contingent on European burden sharing and equal European assistance going forward.” The national security adviser’s approach is all about conditions. If Russia refuses to negotiate with Ukraine, Waltz believes the United States is justified in sending more weapons to Ukraine.

While Waltz’s views about the United States' funding of Ukraine have changed over the course of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Waltz said during a Fox News interview that he had a productive meeting with the previous National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. He bragged that the Trump transition team has been working “hand in glove” with the Biden regime.

“For our adversaries out there that think this is a time of opportunity that they can play one administration off the other, they’re wrong, and we are — we are hand in glove. We are — we are one team with the United States in this transition,” Waltz emphasized.

As for the Middle East, Waltz is a fervent Zionist who wants Israel to achieve hegemony in the region. Prior to the latest flare up in Gaza, Waltz said to the Jewish Insider that the United States needed to take more proactive measures to deter Iran and its proxies, while also economically strangling it. He cited the assassination of Major Gen. Qassem Soleimani as an example of establishing deterrence.

When Israel was involved in tit-for-tat missile attacks with Iran last year, Waltz suggested that Israel should have attacked Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil terminal, and its nuclear installations at Natanz. With Waltz in the mix, foreign policy conflicts will always be one deck during a Second administration.

7. Elise Stefanik, Ambassador to the United Nations

While she was the representative of New York’s 21st congressional district from 2015 to the present., soon-to-be United Nations ambassador Elise Stefanik had a typical pro-Zionist conservative track record and funding base.

Stefanik received over $700,000 from pro-Israel groups in the 2023-2024 congressional cycle. Interestingly, Stefanik received close to $30,000 in funding from Apollo Global Management, an asset management firm founded by Jewish investors Leon Black, Josh Harris, and Marc Rowan. Rowan, in particular, has been vocal about crushing university protests against the Jewish state’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.

Stefanik’s Israel First advocacy in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, from her grilling of university presidents to calls to clamp down on student protests, won her many friends in the pro-Zionist set of organized Jewry. The corporate media has referred to Stefanik as a "gift to Netanyahu" and the "battering ram of Trump's 'Israel First' policy.”

To add insult to injury, Stefanik is a mass migration booster. In 2021, Stefanik voted for the “Farm Workforce Modernization Act.” It would have granted amnesty to illegal alien farmworkers and streamline the federal H-2A visa program for new agricultural workers entering the country. According to NumbersUSA, one of the leading immigration restriction organizations in the United States, Stefanik has a sub-par 47% career rating in terms of how she has voted on immigration related issues.

8. Mike Huckabee, United States Ambassador to Israel

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) and current United States Ambassador to Israel makes no bones about his support for the State of Israel. He has described himself as an "unapologetic, unreformed Zionist.”

On the issue of Palestinian territories, he has referred to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” — a clear move to appeal to the religious zealot factions of the Israeli Right — and has even denied the very existence of a Palestinian identity. He added, "The idea that they have a long history, dating back hundreds or thousands of years, is not true."

Israel can count on Huckabee to fully support its Old Testament fantasies of creating a Greater Israel and look the other way when it engages in geopolitical perfidy abroad.

9. Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture

Brooke Rollins is a seasoned veteran of the conservative think tank complex, From 2003 to 2018, Rollins served as president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. In 2018, Rollins was brought onto the Trump administration to serve as Trump’s assistant for governmental and technology initiatives in addition to becoming a member of the Office of American innovation.

As a seasoned functionary of Conservatism Inc, economic reductionism became part of her M.O. In other words, all social maladies ranging from rampant crime to mass migration could be simply solved by implementing tax cuts, deregulating the economy, and importing more “skilled migrants.”

Rollins played a key role in pushing for Trump to sign the First Step Act in 2018, a veritable jailbreak bill that allowed for an alarming number of violent criminals to go back to the streets and wreak havoc. What’s more, at the height of the George Floyd unrest when the nation was being ripped apart by leftist militants and all manner of criminals, she spouted politically correct platitudes about how the nation was “in mourning for the senseless death of George Floyd and the senseless loss of livelihood all over this country” instead of calling for heavy-handed measures to quell the NGO-backed saturnalia of the Summer of Floyd.

To boot, Rollins is a mass migration zealot who is on record stating she doesn’t “know of anyone who is against” significantly “expanding the number of visas for highly skilled workers.” In the capacity of Secretary of Agriculture, Rollins would likely look for underhanded ways to expand legal immigration in the farm sector at working-class Americans' expense.

^{Brace Yourselves for Disappointment}

Donald Trump vowed to end the NATO-funded proxy war in Ukraine in 24 hours. However, after threatening to further sanction Russia if it did not enter a negotiated settlement with Ukraine, Trump appears to be fine with continuing to escalate tensions with Russia. As I've previously documented, Trump’s track record on Russia is quite hawkish, contrary to media depictions of him as a Russian puppet. All things considered, Russo-American relations will likely remain tense.

With respect to the Middle East, Trump remains committed to defending Israel. Despite a ceasefire reached between the Israelis and Hamas, Trump has already given the green light to sending Israel thousands of 2,000-pound bombs and has apparently been in talks with Israel to resettle Palestinians into other countries such as Egypt and Jordan — ethnic cleansing by another name.

Trump’s team has also been in talks to expand the Abraham Accords, with a particular focus on normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Seeing through the rosy talk about heightened cooperation and moving towards a bright future, the Abraham Accords are merely a scheme to build an anti-Iran balancing coalition. Though Israel’s live-streamed genocide of the Palestinians since October 7 has horrified the Arab Street, thus making Gulf Arab leaders leery of deepening ties with the Jewish State. Nevertheless, the gaggle of neocons and Israel Firsters surrounding Trump makes a potential conflict with Iran a not-so far-fetched prospect in the next few years.

On immigration, Trump has been a mixed bag. On Day 1 he issued an executive order to get rid of birthright citizenship. Unfortunately, this measure will be tied up in the courts as a federal judge in Washington state recently blocked Trump’s order. This issue will be litigated in the courts for some time before the Supreme Court finally rules on the matter.

More concerning is Trump’s stance on H-1B visas. These visas let “skilled” foreigners employed in specialty occupations enter the country on a temporary basis. This is a godsend for Big Business, which is always craving new sources of cheap labor. Trump, himself, is also partial to H-1Bs. In correspondence with The New York Post, Trump said, "I've always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That's why we have them.”

"I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I've been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It's a great program," he added.

One can only guess how a Trump second term will pan out. But if the long history of Republican presidential administrations disappointing their constituents is a guide, it’s no stretch to believe that Trump 2.0 will end up being a complete dud.

At this juncture, a strong dose of political imagination is required for America First nationalists to break out of the ossified strictures of American politics.

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