Over the weekend President-elect Donald Trump announced three high-level selections in the State Department to work under current Florida Senator Marco Rubio, his nominee for Secretary of State.

Rubio has received bipartisan support for his nomination, including from Democratic Senators John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York), with the latter declaring on Tuesday that he had a “good and productive meeting” with Rubio. “We had good discussions about Ukraine, the Middle East, Haiti and China,” Schumer added.

Trump nominates fascists for top State Department posts    BY Jacob Crosse

 

 

All three men who are slated to work at the State Department under Rubio and Trump have affirmed their support for Trump’s “America First” agenda. Two are outright fascists, while the third, and most senior, is a product of the foreign policy elite who has already demonstrated his willingness to serve Trump.

The most “conventional” of Trump’s choices was Christopher Landau, 61, to serve as Deputy Secretary of State. In his announcement of Landau, Trump noted that Landau previously served as his ambassador to Mexico from 2019-2021, “where he worked tirelessly with our team to reduce illegal migration to the lowest levels in History.” Trump wrote that Landau, along with Rubio, will “promote our Nation’s Security and prosperity through an American First Foreign Policy.”

Landau is currently a lawyer at high-profile Republican firm Ellis George Cipollone O’Brien Annaguey LLP in Washington, DC. Prior to that he practiced at Kirkland & Ellis for more than 25 years. A Harvard graduate who argued nine cases in front of the Supreme Court, Landau previously clerked for far-right Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. His father, George Landau, was also a high-level State Department official, serving at various times as the US ambassador to Paraguay, Chile and Venezuela.

Like Rubio, Landau will face Senate confirmation, but the New York Timesreported “he is expected to have little problem being confirmed ... for the new position.”

On December 8, Trump also announced that Michael Anton, 55, will be working at the State Department as Director of Policy Planning. Trump noted that Anton “served me loyally and effectively at the National Security Council in my First Term.”

Anton is part of a crop of fascist “intellectuals” that migrated from the George W. Bush administration to backing Trump in 2016. Anton has been a Republican for decades, previously working as the director of communication for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and as a speechwriter for then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Speaking at an event in Budapest this past May, Anton acknowledged, “I was in the second Bush administration, I was around for Afghanistan and Iraq, I actually didn’t have anything to do with policy really but I helped make a public case for those things.”

In addition to making the “public case” for aggressive and illegal war, Anton worked as the director of communications at Citigroup, the 12th largest bank in the world as of 2023, and as a managing director at BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, with some $11.5 trillion under its control as of 2023.

A creature of Wall Street and the corporate elite, prior to the 2016 election Anton published a racist essay in the Claremont Review of Books online titled, “The Flight 93 Election,” in which he echoed “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric to implore reluctant Republicans and neo-Nazis to vote for Trump.

In the essay, Anton claimed Republicans lost presidential elections due to “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty,” and the supposed refusal of the Democrats to stop “mass immigration.”

No matter how many elections they lose, how many districts tip forever blue, how rarely (if ever) their immigrant vote cracks 40%, the answer is always the same. Just like Angela Merkel after yet another rape, shooting, bombing, or machete attack. More, more, more!

 

In contrast, Anton argued that, “Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.”

After Trump won in 2016 Anton was appointed to be the Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications on the US National Security Council, a position he held until April 2018. In September 2020, the same month Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” Anton published another fascist essay in The American Mind, a publication of the Claremont Institute, titled “The Coming Coup?”, in which he argued that “Democrats and their ruling class masters” were “openly talking about staging a coup.”

Leaving no doubt among Trump’s fascist and neo-Nazi supporters who the “ruling class masters” were, Anton wrote that “Democratic grandees” and “anti-Trump former Republicans” had gathered “on “George Soros’s dime” to oppose Trump. 

Finally, Michael Needham, 42, former chief of staff of Rubio and currently chairman of the far-right organizations American Compass and America 2100, has been nominated for the position of counselor of the State Department.

Needham started working at the right-wing Heritage Foundation in 2004. In 2010 he founded “Heritage Action for America” and was its CEO before moving to Compass. Needham has written many anti-immigrant screeds for his right-wing paymasters, writing in Compass earlier this year that “millions of illegal immigrants flooding across our border pose immediate threats—drugs, crime, untenable strains on our public services,” and that it has “has tremendous implications on our culture.” 

Needham founded America 2100, a right-wing cesspool, in 2023 with other staffers from Rubio. The senior adviser and “face” of America 2100 has been 26-year-old Nate Hochman, a former staffer on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s failed 2024 presidential campaign.

Hochman was fired from the campaign this past summer, after a social media video he produced and posted on social media featuring neo-Nazi imagery to promote DeSantis.

Since being fired from the DeSantis campaign, Hochman has seamlessly transitioned to producing neo-Nazi content for the Rubio-aligned think-tank. Over this past year, America 2100 has produced several far-right videos and social media threads advocating mass deportation, increased military preparations for war with China and in support of Trump’s tariff agenda.

In support of Trump’s anti-Haitian agitation, Hochman created a series of fascist videos targeting Haitian immigrants in Charleroi, Pennsylvania. The America 2100 X account tweeted on September 23, “In two years, they’ve been overwhelmed by thousands of Haitian immigrants.” One of the videos created by America 2100 targeting immigrants in Pennsylvania was favorably retweeted by Elon Musk.

In a separate X thread posted on November 11, America 2100 advocated for mass deportations and favorably cited the Eisenhower administration’s 1954 “Operation Wetback” as a positive example for the coming administration.

The most successful mass deportation in American history happened in 1954—exactly 70 years ago. A program known as “Operation Wetback” removed 1.1 million illegal aliens in just a few months. Here’s the kicker: They did it with only 750 agents. 

The account added:

Today, we have 21,000 Border Patrol agents—and far more sophisticated security, surveillance, and enforcement technology. If 750 could remove more than 1 million, what could 21,000 do?” The thread concluded that “Mass deportations work... Luckily, President Trump is surrounded with people—like [Stephen Miller] and [Tom Homan]—who understand this. And they’re serious about doing it.

None of these three nominees is an opponent of the agency they will serve or of the so-called “Deep State.” On the contrary, they represent the integration of the military-intelligence apparatus and Trump’s fascist entourage.

All of them have and will continue to advance the geopolitical interests of US imperialism and the financial oligarchy above the needs and interests of the working class, in the US and internationally above all else. 

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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/12/lvox-d12.html

 

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Donald Trump nominated Marco Rubio to be Secretary Of State.  I think there’s little doubt he’ll sail through his Senate hearings, being, as he is, a member in good standing of “the club.”

 

Yeah, yeah, I hear you, MAGA.  “He’s a deep state snake! He signed off on that disgraceful Senate Intelligence Committee report befouling Trump with page after page of half-baked Russian innuendo!”  I know. I know.  But part of the answer to why Rubio won’t be a problem is right there in front of you!

He won’t be Chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee in a new Republican majority Senate, and he was due to take the gavel! 

 

So that’s a very, very good thing. 

And it’s likely the only way he’d ever be removed from that committee.

 

Now, that’s not to say the next Republican to take his place won’t be just as snake-y, but we can’t help or control that so calm down.  No need to get worked up over things you can’t control.

But the best part? That nobody is talking about?

Secretary of State under a Trump presidency is at best a ceremonial role.

Why?

Trump is his own Secretary of State.

Nobody can do “diplomacy” quite like The Boss, and if you recall, The Boss took all the foreign meetings, managed them himself, and only sent Rex Tillerson/Mike Pompeo on errands which didn’t require his unique talents.  Heck, he didn’t even bother to invite Tillerson/Pompeo to some foreign dignitary meetings, and their absence was memorable for the break in tradition.  You almost always see a Secretary of State sitting right next to POTUS whenever a foreign head of state is having a face-to-face with the American president but that was notably not so more than once in the first term.  And I would argue not more was made of it because everyone just understood what I’m saying here:

 

 

 

Trump is his own Secretary or State.

In fact, I’d argue that the best a Trump Secretary of State can do is simply not muck up the message.  Not mucking up will be the best outcome on any given day for Rubio.  Should he go off the reservation, you can be sure he will hear about it from The Boss.  Trump doesn’t have to tolerate disloyalty from this cabinet member, above all others, because foreign policy is the one area a president has almost plenary control over, so he won’t take kindly to having it, more than every other area, mucked with.  He doesn’t have to tolerate it also because the easiest thing to do with a Secretary of State who’s misbehaving is ground him.  Just don’t send him anywhere.  Keep him at Foggy Bottom answering emails all day.  At least if he goes rogue at State, there will be a record of it.

No, Rubio isn’t a problem.  Trump knows.  Trump knows Rubio hates the Senate. (He said as much during his run for president in 2016.) Trump knows Rubio will love having Secretary of State on his resume, so when he decides to run for president again, he can point to a peaceful world attained under his and Trump’s leadership.  You know it’s coming.  It’s just a question of when: will he wait out J.D. Vance running in 2028?  Or will he jump in?  That’s a calculation he will have to make, but make no mistake, this gig is a presidential-run resume-enhancer for Rubio and everyone knows it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/11/rubio

 

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