Beware the war-monger NeoCons worming back into our politics under the guise of "protecting democracy."

Not every foreign policy problem has a hard power solution.

There’s a lot of kvetching in the small and once-mighty Neoconservative (NeoCon) world that Donald John Trump is a “threat to democracy,” and must be stopped from winning in 2024. It’s the same loaded talking point that propelled Democrats to 2022 midterm victory and, if allowed to fester without caveat, will ensure Biden’s reelection. The argument, sadly, has some legs. During his three-year grievance tour that has, of late, mercifully started to focus on policy, Trump trafficked in overwrought poppycock regarding 2020 election “fraud.” As is often the case with “the blue-collar billionaire,” his instincts are correct, even when his specifics are not.

Something was indeed wrong with the 2020 election: Democrat political operatives circumvented state election procedures without state legislative approval, especially regarding mail-in voting, drop boxes, ballot deadlines, and ballot harvesting. Trump’s legal team loosely argued these claims in judicial appeals, but these salient points got lost amid a sea of throw-everything-against-the-wall horsepucky, weakening Trump’s case.

It is undeniable: Democrats intervened in the 2020 election––not only with the above abuses but with Zuck Bucks to election workers and a cynical disinformation campaign deploying former intel grandees to cover up the existence of Hunter Biden’s lethal laptop. Politics is a nasty sport. Move on, say Dems and Never Trumpers.

But Trump and his devotees cannot, will not, and should not move on. The Democrats did not move on from January 6, even after they won the White House. They spent two years obsessing on it, profiting from it, hectoring America over it, as a profligate and unchecked Joe Biden drove the roaring––if COVID-sucker-punched––Trump economy into an inflationary ditch. As Trump and his voters know, today’s better-organized, media-savvy, and mob-skilled Democrats are a far greater threat to democracy than anything envisioned by the small ragtag collection of QAnon crazies, lookie-loo grannies, and Duck Dynasty wannabes on January 6. Those Democratic threats have come fast and furious since 2008––the Ferguson Riots, Baltimore Riots, DNC-concocted Steele Dossier, FISA court abuse, broader Trump/Russia collusion canard, the horrifically violent Summer of Insurrection across dozens of cities, police precincts, and federal buildings, the collusion between the Department of Justice and social media to censor conservative speech, the deliberate failure of Democratic mayors to police crime, the open border, and the all-of-state, all-of-media negative news cover-up––a DNC-coordinated election interference scheme polls show was key to Biden’s victory.

Democrats are pros at manipulating media and democracies here and abroad, which is why they have been slyly effective at projecting the anti-democratic label upon the comparatively naive, unskilled, and ham-fisted Trump and his “low-information” Republican base. MAGA long ago intuited they were being gamed by Democrats and the deep state, but they lacked the wherewithal to respond with the same sinister sophistication. As January 6 showed, they often lash out in dumb, conspiratorial, and boorish ways, feeding the elite Democrat caricature of them as “deplorables.” Like Trump, they have an inchoate grasp of Machiavellian evil, nowhere near the multi-layered Democratic grasp of it, let alone the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) sick cynical ability to leverage a crisis for preexisting socio-political aims.

Running a close second to Democrats in the threat-to-democracy department are NeoCons, who, though originally liberal, are today’s Never Trumpers. These scions of esoteric conservative media, clubby think tanks, globalist policy journals, and councils of foreign relations held the Republican Party hostage for nearly twenty years pre-Trump, helping engineer the weapons of mass destruction lies that enabled the disastrous Iraq War, as well as the unconditional support of Israel no matter how unjust and unhelpful “the Jewish state’s” settlement policy was, is, and forever will be. If NeoCons fully had their way, America would have invaded Iran, Syria, and Venezuela long ago.

These smug, if entertaining, interventionists can still be heard on the Commentary Magazine podcast, in The Free Press, on CNN, and wherever Heritage hawks are hiding out these days. Despite their protestations over the President’s failures on crime and overspending, they are fully aligned with Democrats in their goal of stopping Trump. They wince at the laugh-out-loud incompetence of Biden/Harris only because they seek a ticket more qualified to trounce Orange, not because they disagree with the Administration’s imperial war aims. They fear––and will scheme to stop––Trump’s anti-interventionist agenda.

Why are these intellectually beguiling NeoCons so Trump-deranged when clearly the Democratic axis of Antifa, BLM, The Squad, and open-border globalists is the more palpable security threat? Because NeoCons believe first and foremost in the military-industrial complex and the paternalist (nee colonialist) need for the U.S. to fight other countries’ wars for them. They worship books like Robert Kagan’s The Jungle Grows Back, a fervent defense of American exceptionalism paid with the blood of Trump voters and children.

NeoCons see America as the world’s policeman even though their own brats rarely see the fighting. They are fundamentally insensitive to the survival concerns of Trump’s base, most of whom they have never met and will never meet from inside their DC-NYC bubble. If 100,000 rancher-and-farmer kids must die to protect the Neocons’ new world order, so be it, goes their cynical thinking. It’s a disgusting, callous, arrogant, and dangerous worldview.

In their defense of a self-crippling “American empire,” NeoCons forget the higher principle: the U.S. does best when it models its values to the world, not imposes them, and when it prioritizes human dignity over human slaughter. A U.S. afflicted with a smash-and-grab epidemic, wide open borders, and a corrupt and enfeebled commander-in-chief is not a U.S. that inspires fear, let alone confidence. The U.S. will again be “exceptional” when its streets and borders are protected, and when its young can read at grade level, know where to find foreign countries on a map, and separate fact from fiction. As the ahistorical support of violent extremism on Tik-Tok and in our streets shows, those days are far away.

NeoCons cop to my diagnosis, while failing to grasp root causes and remedies. They pay lip service to the existential threats coming through our borders while urging the debt-ridden U.S. to deploy precious blood and treasure to protect borders far from home. The true goals of MAGA––jailing Joe Biden for using his Senate and VP stations to enrich himself and his family; punishing the ringleaders of the five-year anti-Trump coup; deporting illegal immigrant felons; ending sanctuary cities; curtailing foreign aid until our own fiscal house is back in order; unleashing U.S. domestic energy production so we don’t have to fight wars for oil in the Middle East; ending the fentanyl crisis; sending in U.S. special forces to take out Mexican drug cartel terrorists; terminating no-cash bail; and tying federal aid to Dem-run cities to radically decreased crime––are not the goals of NeoCons, let alone Democrats. NeoCons display token obeisance to some of this agenda as long as American support continues to flow into their anti-Communist, anti-Arabist, foreign policy adventurism. It’s why they will vote for Biden over Trump every day of the week while claiming to be “conservative.” It’s also why they backed Hillary over Trump. They know that the greatest threat to their military-industrial gravy train is an America First movement loaded for bear.

From Brennan to Clapper to Frum to Hayden to Schmidt, NeoCons are welcome to shill their books, and serve as token GOP stooges, on DNC disinformation outlets from CNN to MSNBC to NPR to PBS as long as they truck in the standard Resistance tropes of Trump and MAGA as “authoritarian,” “racist,” “unpatriotic,” “anti-Semitic,” “Russian agents.”

During his four years in office, Trump threw a bone to NeoCons with his massive buildup of the Pentagon, even as the Pentagon actively worked to undermine his Administration. He window-dressed his support for Israel by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, fully aware that aligning too closely with “The Jewish State” could lead the U.S. back into forever wars, which the Trump base––”who,” per Ret. Cong. Jeff Fortenberry, “grow our food, make our stuff, and fight our wars”––rightly eschews.

Trump’s Abraham Accords and Fortenberry’s Middle East Partnership for Peace Act (MEPPA) smartly pivoted the U.S. away from standard NeoCon hard power solvency. As the quiet takeouts of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani showed, Trump’s use of hard power was judicious, strategic, and effective. By talking to China, North Korea, and Russia, and quietly displaying, but not deploying our very big stick, Trump kept America's enemies at bay. Biden and his NeoCon pals of convenience have achieved just the opposite.

With NeoConservatives like Mike Pence, John Bolton, Elliot Abrams, and son-in-law Jared Kushner out of the way––and arch-NeoCon irritants Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, and Jennifer Rubin relegated to the dust heap of history––a second-term Trump could more assiduously pursue a non-interventionist agenda. No longer needing to win reelection should he prevail in 2024––unlikely as that is given the GOP’s tone-deaf post-Dobbs messaging on abortion, the strength of the Democrat vote-grabbing machine, and his high unfavorability with key swing constituencies––Trump could once and for all discard the deeply embedded Bush/Biden NeoCon “holdovers” and embrace the heartfelt demands of a long-suffering blue-collar base no longer willing to be cannon fodder for conflicts abroad in which those they are protecting are unwilling to fully join the fight.

Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “In great empires, the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them, this amusement compensates [for] the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war and those which they had been accustomed to pay[ing] in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.”

Even with the manifest horribles of the messianic and mafia-like terrorist group Hamas––which Israel is fully in its right to surgically dismantle––it’s unconscionable that the U.S. would even think of sending America’s sons and daughters to directly protect “the Jewish state,” let alone battle against Iran-backed proxy regimes in Lebanon and Syria, when the young ultra-Orthodox settlers (Haredim) in the Israel settlements most at risk from Hamas and Hezbolah incursions eschew military service. The majority of non-Haredim Israelis––who are required to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)––concur.

That core, ugly, upstairs-downstairs hypocrisy was at the heart of recent NeoCon wars to protect Kuwait oil sheiks, cowardly Afghan deserters-in-chief, and corrupt Iraqi posers, with ghastly consequences for our veterans. The constituency in each region that stands to benefit the most should do the bombing, fighting, and funding. And that also applies to Ukraine, a corruption-plagued non-NATO nation primarily within Europe’s ambit.

NeoCons naturally embrace the rabid Sikh (turned Christian) war-monger, Nikki Haley, another NeoCon stalking horse for the forever wars that have cratered America’s standing abroad and fiscal sanity at home. No wonder Wall Street bankers and Beltway lobbyists are lining up behind her, even as her hypocrisy and bloodlust are savagely exposed by the Jesuit-educated Vivek Ramaswamy (who, on cue, is universally dismissed by NeoCon elites).

No true Republican, certainly no true Trumper, should give these America Last turncoats a lick of allegiance. They want Trump to play by the New Testament mantra of “turn the other cheek” even as they play by the Old Testament mantra of “eye for an eye.” Given their diabolical track record, that makes Neocons the true threat to democracy. MAGA, beware.