Is Donald Trump a "neocon"?
The time has come to retire the term “neocon.” While this ignoble moniker may have once described an identifiable ideological tendency, and even a tangible, elite-driven political movement, “neocon” has come to be used almost exclusively as a nebulous slur — always a tell-tale sign of a term’s diminishing utility. To label someone a “neocon” now most commonly functions as a sort of political pump-fake, with a phantom blob of “neocons” always allegedly conniving to undermine Donald Trump — or whom Trump always finds himself accidentally empowering, despite his best instincts. This self-serving formulation presents Trump as having divergent interests with the reviled “neocons,” even as Trump consistently installs them to prominent government positions and pursues their preferred policy objectives.
A perfect illustration of the term’s non-utility can be seen in Trump’s recent round of cabinet appointments. On November 9, Trump blasted out a Truth Social post announcing that Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley would not be invited back into a Second Trump Administration. This sent certain observers into an orgiastic frenzy, as they declared that Trump had finally and truly purged the hated “neocons” from the Republican Party. But then came the standard pump-fake: in typical Trump fashion, he thereafter announced picks for the very same roles that Pompeo and Haley had previously occupied… and they turned out to be substantively interchangeable with Pompeo and Haley.
Elise Stefanik, the replacement for Haley as UN Ambassador, differs from her predecessor only insofar as Stefanik made it a foremost life mission over the past several years to kiss Trump’s ass at every conceivable opportunity. Notably, this has never required Stefanik to abandon her unstinting “neocon” foreign policy convictions, which are clearly no barrier to political assimilation with Trump. Haley, by contrast, plainly deviated from the crucial ass-kissing imperative when she launched a doomed campaign against Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries — an endeavor made all the more useless by Trump’s refusal to participate in the TV debates. This avoidance allowed him to limit his articulation of policy positions on such minor matters as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. From the time he announced his 2024 campaign all the way back in November 2022, Trump endlessly repeated the counter-factual assertion that these conflicts “never would have happened” had he been permitted to stay in power after the 2020 election. Traditionally, a core task for any presidential candidate is to put forward future-oriented policy prescriptions. But not for Trump, whose devoted followers were largely content with a re-election argument that essentially boiled down to “reinstate Trump to power, and let the chips fall where they may.”
Nevertheless, Trump was clearly impressed with Stefanik’s hard-charging style. While maintaining her hardcore interventionist policy views, she assiduously re-branded as MAGA, or even “Ultra MAGA” — a slogan which, along with “America First,” is very much hospitable to those who might have been previously decried as “neocons.” Stefanik started out her political career by going straight from the Harvard Kennedy School to an apprenticeship with none other than George W. Bush, followed by a detour at the staunchly “neocon” DC think tank “Foundation for Defense of Democracies,” before eventually settling into an Upstate New York congressional district that she diligently scouted for maximum electoral expediency.
More recently, Trump has been a huge fan of Stefanik’s lead role in fomenting an absurd “anti-Semitism” panic since October 7, 2023; both have vowed to carry forth the “America First” agenda of using the coercive power of the state to punish speech critical of Israel by calling it “anti-Semitism.” Stefanik will no doubt be an able partner in this enterprise from her perch at the United Nations.
Secretary of State, though, is where the real consequential power comes into play. Shortly after everyone on Truth Social was led to believe that the “neocons” had been expelled from a forthcoming administration, Trump swapped out Mike Pompeo with Marco Rubio, who would have to be one of the most paradigmatic examples of a “neocon” elected official in 2010s and 2020s — at least if that moniker any longer had a coherent meaning, which it plainly doesn’t. Rubio dedicated much of his career to advancing a foreign policy paradigm squarely in the mold of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, whose “amigo” squad he eagerly joined upon entering the Senate in 2011. One of his first triumphant voyages was to the ruins of Libya, to celebrate the glories of US and NATO military intervention in that country.
A few years later, Rubio sought the 2016 Republican presidential nomination with the enthusiastic support of “neocon” operatives, media boosters, and financiers — back when Trump was still widely viewed by that set as a dangerous interloper. But their antipathy would be short-lived. For instance, Rubio was the favorite son of hedge fund mogul and “neocon” GOP mega-donor Paul Singer, whose operation also initially underwrote the dirty “opposition research” that eventually culminated in the notorious “Steele Dossier” — painting Trump as a compromised Russian colluder, and positing the existence of a videotape of Trump being urinated on by prostitutes at a Moscow hotel. By 2024, Singer happily invested at least $5 million in the Trump campaign operation. If anyone found this development confusing, they must’ve missed that Singer and Trump had buried the hatchet at least six years ago, as Singer was undoubtedly thrilled by Trump’s muscular “pro-Israel” agenda.
Admittedly, Trump’s public dismissal of Mike Pompeo was a little odd, because there had never been much indication that the two enjoyed anything but harmonious relations as they pursued joint policy goals during Trump’s first term. I was even present at one of the final Trump Rallies before Election Day, at which Trump called out to Pompeo by name and had him stand up for a nice big round of applause. The only minor dustup between the two seemingly occurred during the post-presidency interregnum period, when they supported rival candidates in the 2022 Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania. Pompeo was of the belief that Trump’s peculiar choice, Dr. Mehmet Oz, posed certain national security risks because of his dual Turkish citizenship and the fact that he’d once served in the Turkish military. Trump was evidently willing to overlook this risk, in light of Dr. Oz’s success at hosting a syndicated daytime television program. And now Oz has been appointed to run Medicare and Medicaid, so perhaps the foreign influence concerns can be shelved.
But other than that one weird proxy dispute, Pompeo and Trump were always on the same page, by all available accounts, whether it was launching a failed regime change gambit in Venezuela (with Rubio as their point-person in the Senate), manufacturing a bogus pretext to drone-assassinate Iran’s top general, or reaffirming a commitment for Ukraine to join NATO. One would also think that Pompeo’s newfound denigration in MAGA/LaLa Land as an odious “neocon” would by extension have to mean that the First Trump Administration was itself odiously “neocon,” but strangely, Trump always seems to escape that rude opprobrium — hence the increasing uselessness of “neocon” as a terminological construct. Trump can install a rabid “neocon” to run US foreign policy for the majority of his first term in office, but somehow this never seems to reflect on the inclinations of Trump himself, who by article of faith is always assumed to have been haplessly tricked or manipulated into appointing the wrong people — like an innocent Mr. Magoo perpetually stumbling through the Republican Party and Executive Branch.
One of the few permitted critiques of Trump in MAGA/LaLa Land had previously been that Trump was a political novice in the first term, and was beguiled by the wily “neocons” who exploited his youth and inexperience. As facile as that argument was, it at least had the benefit of reflecting some partial reality: Trump indeed had no governing record or long-established political operation. But in 2024, that argument is comically absurd. Trump singularly dominates the Republican Party more than perhaps any figure in American history, as evidenced by his unprecedented thrice-consecutive presidential nomination. He can pick winners of Republican congressional primaries with a single Truth Social post, and even ousted the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus earlier this year for no apparent reason other than the poor sap’s initial endorsement of Ron DeSantis. He installed his own daughter-in-law to run the Republican National Committee. By now, he’s had over eight years to assemble a personnel roster that best represents whatever his policy preferences may be — and he has largely assembled a team of “neocons,” if that term had any cognizable meaning, which it doesn’t.
Rubio’s nomination by Trump didn’t just come out of nowhere. Anyone who was “surprised” by the choice was either woefully misinformed, willfully deluding themselves, or purposely peddling propaganda based on the fanciful notion that Trump had some steadfast commitment to banishing “neocons.” Rubio was on the final “short-list” for Trump’s 2024 vice presidential selection, and had been a vital governing partner during Trump’s first term, particularly on foreign policy. He was a star member of Trump’s traveling campaign retinue in 2024, a Trump media surrogate at the debates, and a featured speaker at the rallies. He actually addressed the crowd in Spanish at the final Pennsylvania rally I attended on November 4, 2024. Trump also hit the campaign trail on Rubio’s behalf in the 2022 midterms, exhorting the crowd to “drain the swamp” by re-electing Rubio to his Senate seat in Florida. If any of this was unknown to you, perhaps you should re-evaluate your sources of political information.
Ultimately, the selection of Rubio as Secretary of State arguably confers him with greater power than if he’d been Vice President, as the Vice President has limited enumerated authorities — technically the Constitution only gives him the power to break a tie vote in the Senate, and to assume the presidency if the principal dies or is removed from office. It’s of course true that Vice Presidents of the modern era (particularly Dick Cheney) have used their bureaucratic muscle to expand their remits. However, the Secretary of State has been one of the signature “Great Offices of State” since the very advent of the Republic. Early occupants of the role include Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Quincy Adams. More recent occupants who wielded extraordinary power include Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, and Antony Blinken. Though every presidential administration is structured differently, Secretaries of State have historically possessed a far greater degree of policy-making autonomy than the Vice President — so it isn’t difficult to see why Rubio might have preferred this role.
If the term “neocon” retained any coherent meaning, which it doesn’t, then the incoming Second Trump Administration would have to be considerably more “neocon” than the first. Trump’s original Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was an ExxonMobil CEO with vaguely apolitical views; he certainly had no longstanding professional commitment to the ideals of US interventionism. Rubio, on the other hand, has spent his career agitating for aggressive American primacy. I invite you to revisit Rubio’s questioning of Tillerson during the January 2017 Senate confirmation hearings, in which Rubio tenaciously browbeat Tillerson on the issue of Russia in particular — demanding that Tillerson declare Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” and express more outrage about 2016 Russian “election interference.” Tillerson was hesitant to go along with Rubio’s hectoring, but now the hectorer himself has taken the helm.
In his August 23, 2024 speech endorsing Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared that Trump told him “he wanted to end the grip of the neocons on US foreign policy.” The credulity with which this proclamation was covered in certain precincts continues to astound. One helpful clarifier might have been for RFK to identify who specifically counts as a “neocon” in 2024, because virtually all “neocons” with any purchase in the Republican Party had been uniform backers of Trump, including those subsequently elevated to key administration positions, like Rubio, Stefanik, and Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor.
Perhaps it would’ve been tentatively possible to argue that “neocons” had been disempowered if the incoming Administration represented a sharp substantive break from the first go-round. But the continuity between Waltz and his predecessor John Bolton is such that Bolton made a rare exception to his usual anti-Trump media crusade to publicly praise the Waltz pick. A former Dick Cheney aide, Waltz clearly spelled out what he took to be Trump’s strategy for “ending” the Ukraine war the day before the November 5 election. According to Waltz, the plan is to escalate the war, by authorizing Ukraine to launch longer-range strikes with US missiles inside Russia (an authorization duly provided, at least in part, by the Biden Administration not long after). Waltz also said that Trump would intensify US sanctions on Russia. I first interviewed Waltz in July 2022 at the “America First Policy Institute” summit when he proclaimed with respect to Ukraine, “Let’s win this damn war!” and called for the US to deploy military advisors on the ground to assist in the operation of weapons systems. Does this make Waltz a “neocon”? If so, what does that make Trump? After all, National Security Advisor isn’t even a Senate-confirmed position; Trump could have picked basically anyone for the job, and he picked one of the most ardent interventionists in the entire US House of Representatives, who just happened to have also spent the past several years — you guessed it — kissing Trump’s ass.
There was of course a time when “neocons,” short for “neoconservatives,” were a discernible enough political faction that it was prudent to affix them with a certain shorthand label. Core members of the group, circa the 1990s and 2000s, included Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, and Bill Kristol, all of whom commanded significant power during the George W. Bush years, whether from inside the Administration or out — then went on to repudiate Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign, thereby aligning themselves with Democrats. Kagan and Kristol continue to wield some residual power within whatever detritus is left of the current Democratic Party coalition; Kagan’s spouse, Victoria Nuland, moved seamlessly from the Bush-Cheney Administration, to the Obama-Biden Administration, to the Biden-Harris Administration.
However, there were also some exceptions in the partisan re-orientation of the original “neocon” cadre. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Dick Cheney aide and a founding signatory of the “Project for a New American Century” letter — which called for regime change in Iraq and presaged the 2003 invasion — was pardoned by Trump in 2018, back in those ancient days when Trump was still referring to Dick as among his most “tremendous supporters,” and the Cheney father-daughter duo were holding fundraisers for Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. Trump even resurrected the old legal architecture of the Iraq invasion, much cherished by the Cheneys, to justify his harebrained assassination of Soleimani.
Other original “PNAC” signatories such as Frank Gaffney remain in good standing with the MAGA/Republican think-tank complex, with Gaffney’s personal outfit, the Center for Security Studies, duly furnishing personnel for the First Trump Administration, and perhaps the Second when all is said and done. Trump even appointed a few of the OG “neocons” to powerful administration positions — like Elliott Abrams, who served as special State Department envoy for regime change in Venezuela, and of course John Bolton, who was National Security Advisor.
If “neocon” simply means “someone with bellicose foreign policy views who I dislike,” then the term ought to be discarded, especially when its main function (as shown by RFK) is to disassociate Trump from the very people he constantly empowers. Again: are Stefanik, Rubio, and Waltz “neocons”? And if so, what does that make Trump?
I am not asserting that Trump is a “neocon” — I am asserting that the term “neocon” ought to be retired, because it clearly obscures more than it reveals in the year 2024, whereas you might have been able to make an argument for its continued utility in the past. After all, Trump himself at various points has echoed rhetoric that could be easily mistaken for George W. Bush at the peak of the so-called “freedom agenda,” when Bush was calling for the US to impose “freedom” across the entire world, including by generous use of military force. In his 2005 inaugural address, Bush proclaimed: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” If you’ve never seen it, please watch Trump’s February 2019 speech demanding regime change in Venezuela. “The people of Venezuela are standing for freedom and democracy, and the United States of America is standing right by their side,” Trump proclaimed, as literal Bush-era operatives like Bolton and Abrams were overseeing the botched regime change gambit. This gentle “freedom” rhetoric could have easily come right out of the mouth of G. W. Bush. Touchingly, Rubio was also on hand for the remarks, and Trump made a special point to single him out for praise.
One area where Trump does depart from the bygone era of ascendant “neoconservatism” is his practice of elevating and drawing succor from even more fanatical “pro-Israel” elements than would’ve been commonplace in the G. W. Bush administration. As a self-proclaimed Evangelical Christian himself, Bush had different imperatives than Trump for coalition management. It may bewilder some younger readers, but Bush was the first US president to call for the establishment of a Palestinian state, and even called for Israel to bring an “end to the occupation” of Palestinian territory. However toothless the rhetoric might have been, these are not words that one could ever fathom coming out of Trump’s mouth at present, as he surrounds himself with religious fanatics and takes hundreds of millions from “pro-Israel” megadonors like Sheldon (RIP) and Miriam Adelson, who in the G.W. Bush era would have still been regarded as somewhat extreme for the mainstream of the Republican Party. Recall, Bush’s father threatened to withhold loan guarantees if Israel continued to authorize Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Trump, by contrast, sent Mike Pompeo to visit the settlements and effectively proclaimed their legality; now true messianic zealots like Itamar Ben-Gvir (who broke with Israeli ministerial code to endorse Trump) and Bezalel Smotrich are celebrating the prospect that Trump will let them annex the West Bank entirely.
Other Trump appointments like Fox News personality Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense have proclaimed their belief that with Trump’s help, the Third Temple will soon be rebuilt in Jerusalem (by destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque.) Is this a “neocon” conviction? It’s hard to say, under the current definition. Because if anything, the traditional “neocons” were disproportionately secular and would have been a bit embarrassed to affiliate themselves with such apocalyptic religious prophecies. Trump, clearly, has no such compunction; he even sent the crazed pastor John Hagee to deliver the opening benediction at the inauguration of the US Embassy in Jerusalem in 2018. Hagee preaches that Christ will imminently return to rule over earth from Jerusalem, and to fulfill this biblical prophecy, the US must provide unyielding military support to Israel. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s choice for US Ambassador to Israel and an “End Times” believer himself, echoes this view.
Speaking of Pete Hegseth — he has to be the most grimly hilarious of Trump’s selections thus far. Hegseth was literally a professional pro-Iraq War activist, having founded an advocacy group called “Veterans for Freedom,” funded by the likes of Sheldon Adelson and advised by Bill Kristol, which lobbied Congress to support the war and aired TV ads trumpeting candidates who supported Bush’s war policy, including Mitch McConnell and Joe Lieberman. Hegseth served on John McCain’s 2008 campaign as a member of the Virginia state advisory committee, spoke at McCain rallies alongside Lindsey Graham, and even appeared with George W. Bush himself to lend support for Bush’s war-escalation plans. He then parlayed the media profile he attained from this pro-Iraq War activism into the Fox News gig. One thing led to another, and now he’s the nominee for Secretary of Defense.
Trump’s lack of concern for empowering proponents of the Iraq War is nothing new. After all, his first Vice President, Mike Pence, was a diehard supporter of the war while serving in Congress and never really wavered from his Bush-era convictions, despite eventually being banished from MAGA/LaLa Land for his declination to go along with Trump’s hallucinatory scheme to reject Electoral College votes.
One amusing rebuttal that’s now being resurfaced in certain quarters is that Trump is admirably assembling a new “Team of Rivals,” with Lincoln-esque oracularity. On the Joe Rogan show, Trump did say that he enjoyed the likes of John Bolton in his cabinet, despite Bolton being an “idiot” who wanted to go to war everywhere, because his presence instilled fear in America’s adversaries. But you can’t have it both ways. Either picking people like Bolton was a legitimate “mistake” — or it was brilliant. Fortunately for Trump, the logic never really needs to add up.
However Trump perceives their function within his administration, his new appointees will still run extraordinarily powerful parts of the Executive Branch; elements of which chug along without the minute-to-minute control of Trump. These people will oversee departments and exercise various degrees of power separate and apart from Trump, even if they are his subordinates, because that’s just how the sprawling federal bureaucracy works.
Jeb Bush, another original signatory of the infamous PNAC “neocon” letter before he became governor of Florida, has been overjoyed with Trump’s appointments. He tweeted his accolades for Susie Wiles, the incoming chief-of-staff and Trump’s top campaign strategist, who previously worked for as “conventional” Republicans as it gets, including on the 2008 John McCain campaign and the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign. She’s also been a corporate lobbyist at the same firm as Pam Bondi, Trump’s newest pick for Attorney General, whom Jeb also offered his resounding congratulations. Naturally, Jeb was highly enthused about Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz. It turns out Jeb’s dramatic displacement by Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries may not have signaled the ideological upheaval some had once assumed.
I will address the selection of Tulsi Gabbard, one perceived aberration to this “neocon” trend, in a later article. For now, if you wish, you can view the discussion I had about her on Kim Iversen’s show, or this post I wrote about her on November 15. I will just briefly add that I struggle to see much in the way of a consistent through-line between Tulsi Gabbard’s 2020 presidential campaign, which I covered more closely than anyone in the United States, and her recent embrace of Trump and the Republican Party. To give one example, Tulsi Gabbard previously referred to Trump as “Saudi Arabia’s bitch” because of Trump’s lavish arms deals with the Saudi monarchy, including for its pulverization of Yemen, which she denounced as a “genocide.” Tulsi Gabbard then joined Trump’s tough-guy entourage at a recent UFC match. Included in that entourage, and seated right next to Trump, was Yasir Al-Rumayyan, head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. Trump has actually increased his financial entanglements with the Saudi royal family since Tulsi Gabbard ridiculed him as Saudi Arabia’s “bitch,” and accused him of facilitating “genocide.” There’s been zero indication that Trump plans any policy shift with regard to the Saudis, except to bolster his support, including by potentially giving them ‘security guarantees’ in exchange for further ‘normalization’ with Israel. This is just one unexplained aspect of the Tulsi Gabbard transformation into Republican operative. But a fuller explanation warrants its own article.
The position to which Tulsi Gabbard has been nominated, Director of National Intelligence, was created in 2004 at the direction of George W. Bush, and its authorities in the federal bureaucracy are somewhat murky. On the other hand, Trump’s incoming CIA Director, John Ratcliffe — whose authorities are much more well-established — has already declared that Iran has committed grave “acts of war” against the United States, allegedly by hacking Trump campaign emails and plotting to assassinate Trump. He’s already on the record demanding military reprisal, including by the US launching joint strikes on Iran with Israel. It seems rather unlikely that Putin would welcome such an attack on one of his increasingly close military and diplomatic partners. In any event, if Trump does follow through with his threat to blow Iran to “smithereens,” at least we can all take solace that the bombings were conducted by “non-neocons.”
Trump was and is weak, stupid and easily manipulated.
He probably has little in the way of concrete or coherent ideology, unless "receive flattery", "preen and look tough" and "repeat whatever the last person who talked to him said" counts as "ideology" these days.
Those who put their hopes in Trump will quickly find that they have been played, or rather, that they played themselves by projecting their wishes onto the loudmouth dope.
EDIT: The comments here are hilarious. Already the Trump Cult is ladling on excuses, just the way the Obama Cult made excuse after excuse for their hero, even as he betrayed them over and over and over.
This is a fantastic essay