Revolution Read online

  Advance Praise for

  REVOLUTION

  “KT McFarland has been at the center of Republican foreign policymaking for decades, starting in the 1970s when she first worked on the National Security Council, continuing through the Reagan Administration, Fox News, and then as President Trump’s first Deputy National Security Advisor. Well written and perceptively argued, Revolution provides interesting insights into the beginning stages of Trump’s foreign policy and the reasoning behind it.”

  —Henry A. Kissinger, Former Secretary of State

  “KT McFarland’s foreign policy experience spans decades. She was a junior aide to Kissinger, a foot-soldier in the Reagan Revolution, and a national security and foreign policy leader of the Trump Revolution. Her insights into American national security—past, present and future—are indispensable.”

  —Joseph Lieberman, Former Senator

  “KT McFarland has personal insider knowledge of how big the fight for freedom is and how dangerous the opponents of freedom both inside the United States and outside are to all of us. An important testimony to the great struggle of our times.”

  —Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the House

  “Over the years KT McFarland has had the courage to challenge conventional wisdom on foreign policy, and has almost always been right. In this book she sounds the alarm about the strategic, technological and economic threats posed by an aggressive, rising China, and lays out what America can do about it.”

  —Matt Schlapp, Chairman of American Conservative Union

  “KT McFarland is an exceptional student, writer, and professional warrior. She had the extraordinary experience of learning from the masters of foreign policy and defense in the Nixon and Reagan presidencies, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Defense Secretary Cap Weinberger and the others that mattered. She’s a pro’s pro! She watched it up close; learned the lessons of diplomacy, both the successes and the failures, and was prepared to offer that experience to the new Trump White House. She now shares those lessons with you the reader. If ‘in the room decision making’ interests you, this is a must read!”

  —Ed Rollins, Former White House Assistant to President Reagan, National Campaign Director Reagan-Bush ’84

  “KT McFarland has been focused on the national security interests of the United States since her time as a young aide to Dr. Henry Kissinger. She has never stopped studying how to protect the U.S. since that time, through her time advising President Trump’s 2016 campaign and setting up its national security shop and in her distinguished media career before and after. Now comes her account of the ‘Revolution’ we are all living through. ‘The Washington elites were stunned by Trump’s victory,’ McFarland writes in the opening pages of this eyewitness account. If they want to get over their shock while also recognizing the growing perils to the country from abroad, this timely important book is the place for them—and all Americans—to start.”

  —Hugh Hewitt, Nationally Syndicated Radio Talk Show Host,

  President of the Richard Nixon Foundation

  A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

  Revolution:

  Trump, Washington and “We the People”

  © 2020 by KT McFarland

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-64293-404-5

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-405-2

  Cover photo by Tom McCall

  Cover design by Juan Pablo Manterola

  Interior photos edited by Justin Hoch

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  In several cases, this book deviates from the more accepted capitalization and grammatical rules. This is deliberate, to give special emphasis to certain offices, organizations, and unofficial groupings.

  Post Hill Press

  New York • Nashville

  posthillpress.com

  Published in the United States of America

  To my husband, Alan Roberts McFarland—

  the love of my life,

  the song to my soul,

  and the north star to my purpose

  Contents

  Part One: Trump

  Chapter 1: Why I Joined the Trump Revolution

  Chapter 2: Washington Elites Versus American Populists

  Chapter 3: Washington’s Failed Economic & Foreign Policies

  Chapter 4: I Joined the Trump Revolution for the

  Same Reasons I Joined the Reagan Revolution

  Chapter 5: @ The Real Donald Trump

  Chapter 6: Trumpism–Before and After Trump

  Chapter 7: Make America Great Again

  Chapter 8: America First

  Chapter 9: China First

  Chapter 10: Peace Through Strength

  Chapter 11: Make Russia Great Again

  Part Two: Washington

  Chapter 12: The Trump Tower Transition

  Chapter 13: Figuring Out Foreign Policy

  Chapter 14: General Flynn

  Chapter 15: Flynn Death Watch

  Chapter 16: White House Months

  Chapter 17: Turning Campaign Promises Into Policy

  Chapter 18: The FBI Comes Calling

  Chapter 19: Investigated By Mueller, Harassed By Congress

  Chapter 20: Impeachment

  Chapter 21: The Administrative State

  Chapter 22: Weaponized Media

  Chapter 23: America’s Political Civil War

  Part Three: We The People

  Chapter 24: We’ve Always Had Revolutions

  Chapter 25: Remembering American Greatness

  Chapter 26: Why America Is–and Remains–Exceptional

  Acknowledgments

  End Notes

  Part One

  Trump

  CHAPTER 1

  Why I Joined the Trump Revolution

  I was as surprised as anyone by Donald Trump’s victory. As a FOX News National Security Analyst, I had spent the day at our studios in midtown Manhattan, watching election commentary, and occasionally providing analysis myself. I was convinced Hillary Clinton would win and, as President, take us even further along the path of economic and global decline. She might have been a less combative President than Trump, but she would have done nothing to stop the erosion of American power and increased indebtedness. She would not have taken the steps necessary to restore America to robust economic growth. As a result, she would have presided over the slow decline of American power and influence and, in time, other countries would rise to take our place on the world stage. In the past, Clinton had picked the wrong foreign policy priorities. She had neglected the aggressive rise of China, yet pushed for interventionism abroad, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. I took no joy in being on cable news that day; I was just going through the motions, resigned to Hillary Clinton’s blowout victory.

  But as polls started closing across the country, and Trump unexpectedly won a few key counties and then some key states, the chatter in the green room at FOX changed. Was there a chance Trump might pull an upset victory? After I finished my last FOX Business News appearance, I headed to Trump’s election night headquarters a few blocks away to watch the impossible first become possible and then inevitable. County after county and state after state posted unexpected wins for Trump. Someone said the Clinton campaign had just cancelled their victory party caterer and the Hudson River fireworks display. Trump’s upset victory was actually going to happen.

  I was a Trump supporter from the beginning. As a fellow New Yorker, I had followed him over the years and liked a lot of what he said, especially when it came to foreign policy. Trump had the guts to stake out contrarian positions at odds with both Republicans and Democrats. He may have expressed his views in an unc
onventional manner, but he had a better track record than most of the experts. I had given foreign policy advice to a number of presidential candidates over the last decade or so, but they were more or less interchangeable. None impressed me as having understood the urgent necessity of reorienting our attention away from the Middle East and toward Asia.

  Trump was the outlier. Finally, here was a Republican candidate who wasn’t afraid to face reality, to admit the mistakes we made in foreign and economic policy, and commit to a major course correction. If he could ever manage to get elected, Trump might actually get something done, no matter how many people he offended along the way.

  I joined Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee in the fall of 2016, after the Republican Convention, and was one of the few well-known and experienced foreign policy experts to do so. I participated in prep sessions for his final debates, and was impressed by his ability to cut through the details and zero in on the core of an issue, almost intuitively.

  I’d already had several interviews with his personnel team, and thought I might be offered a senior position in his Administration if he actually did win. If so, I would be going back to my roots in government service, and fulfilling the dream of a lifetime. As I stood in the middle of the VIP section of Trump’s election night headquarters, I should have been over the moon with excitement and possibility. I should have been jumping for joy.

  But I wasn’t. Instead, I felt an ominous sense that something life-altering—maybe for the better, maybe not—was about to happen to the country and to me. It was a deep feeling of foreboding that nothing would ever be quite the same again. My instincts were right, just not in the way I anticipated.

  By the 2016 election, it was clear America was ready for change. By nominating Trump, the Republican Party had rejected the traditional Republican Establishment. By electing Trump, the country rejected the entire Washington Establishment, Republican and Democrat alike. The battle lines were now drawn. On one side were the elites of both parties who had governed America for decades and supported big government and a globalist, interventionist foreign policy. On the other side were the populists, the ordinary citizens who rarely got excited about politics, but were now mobilized in rebellion against a governing class they believed was arrogant, unresponsive, and unsuccessful. It was a revolt by the governed against the governing.

  The Washington elites were stunned by Trump’s victory. They had always taken for granted their inherent right to govern. They had assumed the country would elect one of their own in 2016, drawing yet again from one of America’s political dynasties. The irony is many of Trump’s supporters were just as stunned by his victory. They identified with his political-incorrectness and outsider status, but never actually thought he could beat Hillary and the Washington machine.

  Since the 2016 election, that divide has grown wider, increasingly rancorous, and more personally destructive. We are now living in the Age of Trump, where the media is all Trump, all the time. Everything in Washington—every person, politician, journalist, analyst, issue, and policy—is now measured as being either pro-Trump or anti-Trump. Our political classes have locked the country into a full-scale, political civil war, which shows no sign of winding down. The outrage industry has cranked the discussion up to the point where we’re always on edge. You can’t even talk about the weather without being put into the pro-Trump or anti-Trump camp. There are no safe, neutral zones in Washington.

  Pundits and politicians throw around words like “populist” and “nationalist,” “elitist” and “globalist” with wild abandon. The terms have been hijacked to sanctify or demonize people, depending on which camp they’re in. They’re the new equivalent of four-letter words—shorthand for everything that is good about your camp and bad about the other camp. It’s the pro-Trump national populists versus the anti-Trump global elitists. As loaded as these terms have become, there is no common agreement about what they actually mean. They mean one thing to the people who identify with them, and the compete opposite to the people who do not.

  Each side sees the other as the enemy and refuses to acknowledge they might possess any redeeming attributes, or even that they may have an opinion worth listening to. The only thing both sides have in common is that they see themselves as virtuous and true, and people on the other side of the great divide as wrong and sometimes even criminally evil.

  It’s worth unpacking what these words mean to the people who identify with them, and to the people who do not. Without definitions, we’re just talking past each other—or more likely, just screaming at each other.

  CHAPTER 2

  Washington Elites Versus

  American Populists

  To the elites, populism means mob rule, and represents the worst in American society—the uneducated, dim-witted masses who have neither the experience nor intelligence to govern themselves. They are the people who shop at Walmart and eat at McDonald’s. The elites see nationalists as the bigoted, narrow-minded, white (mostly male) supremacists who resent the rise of women, minorities, and immigrants. Barack Obama saw them as the bitter people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Hillary Clinton said they belong in a “basket of deplorables,” characterized by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” views. They see nationalists and populists as the people who are, and deserve to be, life’s losers.

  In their version of America, populists are people driven by their hatreds and prejudices, and therefore morally inferior. Conservatives are either angry whites unwilling to make way for deserving minorities, or a rapacious business class trying to perpetuate their unfair privileges in order to keep their ill-gotten spoils. The governing elites see these populist/nationalists as, at best, misguided and simplistic, and at worst, dangerous and evil—the same kind of people who supported Hitler and Mussolini and their racist, nationalist agendas in the 1930s and 40s.

  In contrast, the elites see themselves as society’s leadership class who, by education, experience, and temperament, are best suited to make decisions for the rest of us. They see themselves as upholding the American values of equality, fairness, and inclusiveness. They focus on those in our society who have been treated unfairly in the past—those who didn’t have equal access to education, opportunity, civil rights, or legal redress. They believe it is the job of government to compensate people for wrongs done to them, including to their ancestors in decades past and to make up the difference with quotas and preferential treatment today. There is a whiff of self-righteousness about them, since they are convinced the things they believe in are universal truths, shared by all civilized people, and therefore beyond debate. It goes without saying that they believe that their motives are pure, and that their virtuous beliefs make them morally superior. Therefore, they are, and deserve to be, the final arbiters of our society and government.

  When elitists look abroad, they see an interconnected world, which is moving beyond the nation state to a global society and worldwide economy where people, information, goods, and money should move freely across borders. They are part of a post-nationalist movement that sees the world evolving toward a more peaceful and prosperous place, where we will all be governed by universal norms and international organizations. Elitists equate nationalism with xenophobia, and believe pride in one’s country has been the root cause of most of the wars of the last century. Their hope is that the next century will be one without trade wars, cold wars, or hot wars. It will be a world where international commerce and communication are so intertwined that we will naturally move toward a sort of utopia, bound together by commonly held beliefs, and governed by a global elite which rises above selfish national interests to create a more just and cleaner world.

  As for Trump, elites consider him so dangerous that he must be stopped dead in his tracks. For the first two years of his Presidency, they were convinced the Mueller investiga
tion would charge Trump with criminal offenses, and they shared fantasies that he would be hauled out of the White House in handcuffs and end up behind bars. When the Mueller Report exonerated him, Congressional Democrats and the anti-Trump media doubled down. Even if there was no evidence of colluding with the Russians to steal the election, Trump must be guilty of obstructing justice…somehow or other, for something or other. There might not be enough evidence to convict him in a court of law, but they could ruin him in the political courtroom of public opinion. The Democrat-led House of Representatives would vote articles of impeachment against him and force him to stand trial in the Senate. Failing that, they could have never-ending investigations of Trump, his family, and his associates, going back decades. They would take anything he ever said or did, give it their own spin, and scream, “Impeachment! Impeachment!” They figured even if the Senate couldn’t muster the two-thirds vote necessary to remove him from office, Trump would be so wounded politically that the voters would refuse to reelect him in 2020.

  They’re convinced that Trump is just too corrupt, too belligerent, too incompetent, and too evil to be America’s president. They believe they have the right and even the responsibility to do whatever it takes, including suspending the rules, stretching the truth, and breaking the bounds of tradition to hound him from office.

  They’ve convinced themselves that once he’s gone the country will come to its senses and purge itself of all things, people, and ideas that are pro-Trump. Then Washington can get back to the pre-Trump normal: the Never-Trump Republicans will once again be back in charge of the Republican Party; and the Democrats will return to power and reinstate Obama’s tax-and-spend program at home and globalist worldview abroad.

  The people who call themselves populists and nationalists may not always have a clear idea of what they are, but they do know what they are not—most are neither wealthy, nor powerful, nor in charge. They see themselves as having been cast aside and trampled by the governing coastal elites who dominate the Democrat and Republican parties, Wall Street, Hollywood, the media, academic institutions and, especially, Washington, D.C.