From China eyeing Taiwan and the Russia-Ukraine war, to war drums beating in the Middle East, Trump will re-enter the White House with a world on fire.
During the presidential campaign, Trump promised he would bring an end to the war in Ukraine which will be nearing the 3-year mark when Trump is sworn into office in January.
Now that he is President-elect Trump, there is growing speculation he will drastically reduce U.S. support for the conflict and push for a treaty. On November 6, one day after Election Day, Trump talked to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, by phone. Trump then phoned Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and directly warned Putin not to escalate the war.
National security analyst Bob Maginnis, of the Family Research Council, says there is a lot to negotiate if both sides sit down next year.
"I suspect there'll be something in the mix,” he says, “like NATO membership for Ukraine is not in the immediate offering.”
Some politicians have called for Ukraine to be absorbed by NATO during the current war, which would logically trigger Article 5 and hence war with Russia, but calmer heads have prevented that.
Maginnis predicts any kind of truce would cede the border provinces to Russia with a demilitarized zone manned by NATO forces.
Pentagon ignored Trump's order
Back on the home front, Maginnis says Trump must reverse the damage the Biden administration has inflicted on the Pentagon and the U.S. armed forces with left-wing indoctrination.
“I'm hopeful that we'll get people in there to cut out the nonsense of DEI and some transgender stuff,” Maginnis, who has documented that left-wing activism, tells AFN.
Trump tried to stop the Pentagon’s left-wing indoctrination before, and failed, back in the remaining months of his first term.
At the time, in the fall of 2020, Trump signed an executive order that banned any training that teaches the United State is a racist nation; that people should feel remorse for their race; or that people are responsible for the past actions of the same race or sex.
Two days after Trump signed it, the executive order went ignored by top Pentagon officials who spoke about the important of “diversity” and the Pentagon’s diversity initiatives at a virtual town hall, The Hill reported at the time.
A spokesman for the Army also told The Hill the executive order wouldn’t affect its own “Project Inclusion” diversity training. That training would continue, the spokesman said, because that program doesn't involved Critical Race Theory which Trump's executive order was banning.
A year later, in 2021, the U.S. Military Academy proudly announced it had received several Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Champion Awards at a national diversity conference.
In 2023, the Pentagon announced it was investigating a top DEI chief, Kelisa Wing, for racist social media posts. Wing, who is black, complained in a post she stopped a session after a white participant suggested black people can be racist, too. Wing also wrote she was "exhausted with these White folx."
Wing was never punished for her racist posts but the DEI office was shuttered and she was moved to a new job.
Her promotion to a DEI job came from an executive order, signed by Biden, that ordered all agencies of the federal government to "establish or elevate Chief Diversity Officers," Fox News reported at the time.
'Harpy' used for recruiting
During the Biden administration that followed Trump, all of the military branches reported recruiting problems. Some of them began lowering standards – even for drug use – to find new people to put in a uniform.
During President Biden’s term, the Navy made news for lecturing sailors about proper pronoun and "safe spaces" usage in an video from its Naval Sea Systems Command Inclusion and Engagement Council.
Someone in the Navy also decided to enlist a drag-queen sailor, nicknamed “Harpy Daniels,” for recruiting.
At the same time the Navy was using Harpy to find new sailors, China’s war drums were beating in the South China Sea around Taiwan. A tabletop exercise, conducted for the Pentagon, predicted the weakened Navy could lose two aircraft carriers and 10,000 sailors to the People’s Liberation Army.
When Trump and his military leaders take back the Pentagon, Maginnis says, they must recognize and address the military’s readiness problems, including the Navy’s shrinking fleet.
“We're projected to be only 280 ships by 2037,” Maginnis says, “and that compares with well over 400 that the Chinese will have much before that.”
