Hardly a day goes by without a former Trump Administration official surfacing with a radical new plan for the ex-President’s return to power. Donald Trump’s former budget director Russell Vought, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, is the policy director for the Republican National Convention’s platform committee and, the Washington Post reports, assembling a blueprint for dismantling long-standing political guardrails in this “post-Constitutional” era. Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration ideologue, is vowing to tackle “anti-white racism” in a second Trump term by reinterpreting landmark civil-rights laws on behalf of white people. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which was compiled by an array of Trumpworld characters, has been extensively pored over since its release by those seeking to understand what the coming four years could look like in Washington; it is a nearly thousand-page how-to manual for Trumpists looking to deconstruct the administrative state.
A foreign-policy manifesto for another Trump Administration, released this week by Robert O’Brien, Trump’s fourth and final national-security adviser—and, it seems, an aspirant to return to high office along with him—drew less coverage by comparison, but it is, in its own way, just as sensational. Writing in Foreign Affairs, O’Brien offers an array of plans for Trump 2.0—some of which, like sending the entire Marine Corps to the Pacific, seem wildly implausible; others, such as the complete decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies, both improbable and dangerous. In a single clause in a sentence explaining how Trump’s “unpredictability” will somehow lead to a negotiated settlement with Russia, O’Brien asserts that future lethal aid to Ukraine would come not from the United States but entirely from Europe. (Europe, are you listening?)
It’s the over-all framing, though, that might be the most revealing statement about the bizarre gaslighting exercise at the heart of Trump’s 2024 campaign, with O’Brien offering a revisionist history of Trump as Ronald Reagan’s second coming and portraying Trump as a brilliant statesman who presided over an era of geopolitical calm under the banner of Reagan’s ethos of “peace through strength.” Governed by his stellar “instincts,” Trump took on the “globalist orthodoxies of recent decades,” O’Brien writes, while at the same time militarily strengthening allies and generally bringing peace to the world—in sharp contrast to Joe Biden, whom O’Brien blames for the “catastrophic mismanagement” of the Afghanistan withdrawal, the terms of which were negotiated by Trump; the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and—my favorite line coming from a former Trump official—a policy of “pageantry over substance” on China. “Building alliances will be just as important in a second Trump term as it was in the first one,” O’Brien offers, irony clearly unintended, referring to a President whose signature international move was publicly assailing America’s allies.
This is, to say the least, a highly unconventional assessment of Trump’s foreign policy. “It would be excellent if a second-term Trump channelled Reagan policies,” Kori Schake, the head of foreign and defense policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told me. But O’Brien is describing a President Trump who simply did not exist,