President Trump Responds With America First Rampage After Facing Heat From MAGA Base
Richard Moorhead
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President Donald Trump appears primed for at least three major policy victories this week after facing heat from his earliest and most devoted core base of supporters.
In under 24 hours, substantial progress on three different issues of great importance seems to have been made- two on the America First foreign policy front, and the third on Donald Trump’s signature campaign promise of a ‘big, beautiful’ wall on the southern border with Mexico.
First, a full withdrawal of U.S military personnel from the Middle Eastern nation of Syria was announced on Wednesday. U.S forces had been deployed to the country in the midst of its sectarian civil war with the mission of destroying the Islamic State’s terrorist caliphate. With the direct threat to the United States largely destroyed, American soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen appear poised to return home.
Not fully content with preventing the creation of a new theatre for a re-run of tired and stale establishment foreign policy theory, the Trump administration also has announced the beginning of a withdrawal of American men and women from the nation of Afghanistan. American military involvement in the country has endured since 2001, making it by far the longest single conflict in American history. 7000 troops are slated to return home from the country within a few months, the first phrase of a plan to totally end the United States’ eternal involvement with the costly quagmire.
Trump’s assertion of a foreign policy in the national interests of the United States was enough to send the globalist old guard of the conservative movement into a frenzy, unwilling to accept any deviation from an outdated Cold War ‘liberal imperialist’ American geopolitical strategy.
Perhaps more significant than either of the foreign policy moves was a change of course regarding a government funding deal that refused to provide a bare minimum of $5 billion for the ‘big, beautiful’ wall that Donald Trump’s insurgent presidential campaign became known for. The administration had signaled a willingness to cave to progressive Democrats fighting to keep wall funding out of federal spending.
However, after some of the earliest and most hardcore supporters of the MAGA movement expressed their disapproval with the prospect of yet another government funding package leaving the porous southern border exposed, the President seems to have had a second wind, deciding that he’d refuse to sign any legislation that would leave the wall unfunded. The announcement seems to have been enough to move the ball through one chamber of Congress, as the House of Representatives passed a package that includes $5.7 billion in wall funding.
Now the pressure is on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to shepherd the pro-wall government funding package through the Senate, or the prospect of a government shutdown will loom over the inability of the Senate to get on board with the House and the White House’s plans to fund the wall.
While obstacles remain in the way, and further political will will be required, the past few days show the MAGA agenda to be far from out of reach.
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