To the victors belong the spoilsby digby
The New Yorker subhed to their article about the hellscape of Rex Tillerson’s State Department is this:
Rex Tillerson’s vision as Secretary of State has been of a vastly diminished role for America in the world, and a more militarized one.
That’s Donald Trump’s vision too. He explicitly ran on it. I was freaking out about it. And yet a lot of people who should know better insisted he would be more likely to keep us out of war than Hillary Clinton.
He is a military imperialist. He wants to run tanks parades down the streets of American cities. He wants to add nuclear weapons to our arsenal. He wants to expand our already bloated military to unprecedented levels. He thinks that the way to deal with the world is to tell other countries what to do and if they don’t follow orders, bomb the shit out of them. He has said over and over again, “to the victors belong the spoils.” That’s who he is. That’s what the people who are working for him are attempting to put in place.
He’s so compromised, so ignorant and so over his head that enactment of his vision is impeded. But the GOP congress is happy to fund his outrageous military expansion. And across the executive branch, in particular the State Department, they are busy degrading every instrument of soft power the US has in the world from trade to diplomacy to the destruction of expertise. This vision could end up being accomplished in spite of Trump’s manifest ineptitude and corruption.
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