Donald Trump, after his historic campaign in defying the establishment and going against conventional wisdom, is now being all too conventional.  He is listening to all of the wrong people.

It is amazing that Trump has hired the very people who opposed his candidacy and almost everything it stood for.  Nikki Haley, who endorsed Marco Rubio, and then Ted Cruz, is the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under the Trump administration.  She loves war and putting out propaganda to go to war.  John Bolton, one of the most despicable human beings in existence, is now Trump’s National Security Advisor.

During Trump’s campaign, Trump said that we were lied into war in Iraq.  He said this in South Carolina.  If any other Republican had said such a thing just 4 years earlier, let alone 8 years earlier, they would have had no chance at winning the Republican nomination.  Meanwhile, Bolton – one of the biggest hawks in favor of the Iraq War – is now advising Trump on foreign policy.

And despite the some pro war rhetoric from Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, I previously said that he was about as good as we could have hoped for, given the circumstances.  So, of course, Trump had to get rid of him and put in someone more pro war.

Trump is having this ongoing internal struggle.  He wants to get along with Putin and Russia and cool down tensions.  But the anti-Trump media keeps hammering him on Russia and basically just making things up.  Therefore, Trump doesn’t want to appear to be in the back pocket of Putin.  Because if you aren’t promoting tension and war with Russia, then you must be an appeaser or Putin’s puppet (sarcasm noted).

Trump said the other day that he wants the U.S. military completely out of Syria.  Within a matter of days (or maybe hours), Trump seemingly reversed his position.  He listens to his war generals and other advisors who inform him that he has to make an adult decision and not destabilize the area (even though it is the U.S. government’s presence there that has destabilized everything).

Trump has shown great weakness in all of this.  Despite his many moral shortcomings, I still have hope that there is some good in Trump and that he means well.  I do not have this opinion of Bush and Obama (his predecessors).  They both also campaigned on a more peaceful foreign policy and did the opposite.  Bush did this in 2000, preaching a more humble foreign policy.

But Bush and Obama are both politicians.  They are both liars.  They are both evil people and have little regard for human life.  In Trump, I at least have a little bit of hope that he has some good in him.

Unfortunately, Trump has little in the way of principles.  His only principle is to continually stroke his own ego.  Trump is also in over his head.  I think he knows this by now, but I’m not sure.

Trump has very good instincts in marketing and branding (Lyin’ Ted, Lil’ Marco, Low Energy Jeb, Sloppy Steve, Pocahontas, and Crooked Hillary).  However, this does not transfer over to having good instincts in political office.  He certainly does not have good instincts in who to trust.

I figure there is some strategy in the whole thing in that he wants to get some of the establishment guys in his cabinet so that the Republican establishment will not oppose him (even though they do anyway).  You better believe that if Nikki Haley or John Bolton ever have the opportunity to take down Trump and promote Mike Pence without making themselves look bad, then they will do it in a heartbeat.

I have previously made comparisons between John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump.  I know this bugs the leftists of this world, but there really are a lot of similarities.  Both have/ had their moral shortcomings, but both also were anti-establishment.  They both had instincts in opposing war and getting along with other countries.

The one major difference is that the media was not hostile towards Kennedy to the degree that it has been against Trump.  Kennedy’s enemies kept more quiet and did not expose their agenda as much.  With Trump, the media cannot hide its hatred, and the television pundits try so hard to take him down that they overplay their hands.

While Trump has only been in office for just over a year, the other major difference between Trump and Kennedy seems to be that Trump is more willing to play ball with the establishment.  Kennedy certainly did in some respects, but he opposed the establishment in the most serious arenas – national intelligence and foreign policy.  Kennedy did not want an escalation in Vietnam or the Cold War.  He also said he wanted to tear up the CIA into a thousand pieces.

Trump has been far more wishy-washy.  Johnson and the rest of the establishment knew they could only bend Kennedy so much and feared his pivot towards peace.  Their only solution to the “problem” was assassination.

Trump has been more easily bendable in these critical areas.  He is still a loose cannon, and nobody knows what he is going to say from one day (or one hour) to the next.  Since the establishment thinks they can control Trump in most circumstances, they can somewhat tolerate him for now.  So far, they have been mostly correct in that they have controlled him.  We have not seen a major pullout of troops from the Middle East.

I would rather see someone like Trump who is inconsistent, rather than someone who is consistently pro war.  Still, it is disappointing, though not surprising, that Trump has not been more firm in opposing further interventions overseas.

The left accuses Trump of a lot of things.  They accuse him of being brash and being a bully.  They accuse him of not caring enough and being a loose cannon.  Unfortunately, this is not all that true when it comes to his opposition to the swamp.  He is too weak.  He cares too much what other people think.  He is a loose cannon in the sense that he listens to the establishment too much.  He too often forgets about the silent people who supported him in hopes that he would be tough and oppose the swamp.