Ric Grenell: from internet troll to Trump’s twisted foreign policy guru
If you have the time to read just one long piece today, read this one about Grenell, on tap to be Trump’s Secretary of State or something equally horrifying. He will serve as one of Trump’s top deputies in any case:
Richard Grenell’s quest to be secretary of state in a second Trump administration began late on Election Day in 2020, when the defeated president dispatched loyalists to run shambolic “stop the steal” operations in battleground states.
President Donald J. Trump tapped Mr. Grenell — his combative former ambassador to Germany, acting national intelligence chief and special envoy to the Balkans — to fly by private plane to Nevada, where Mr. Grenell ensconced himself, his dog Lola, lawyers and a crew of activists in a suite at the Venetian Resort, which served as the group’s war room in Las Vegas. In a days-long spectacle, the Trump team filed a lawsuit and aired false accusations of fraud, including one wrongly implicating hundreds of members of the military.
It was all a sham. Mr. Grenell told the team in the war room, two G.O.P. operatives recalled, that the Nevada vote was not, in fact, stolen. The operatives, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal from Mr. Grenell, said he told the team that the goal was simply to “throw spaghetti at the wall” — the operatives described Mr. Grenell making a theatrical tossing gesture as he spoke — to distract the media from calling Nevada while the election battle in neighboring Arizona played out.
In retrospect, one of the operatives said, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol should have subpoenaed everyone in the room, including the operative himself.
Somebody could have stepped forward at the time but then Grenell is a particularly nasty piece of work:
This article is based on interviews with 40 people, including nearly three dozen Republicans. Most asked for anonymity because they did not want to harm their chances of roles in a future Trump administration or to unleash the wrath of Mr. Grenell, who frequently savages those he disagrees with on social media. One Republican former operative said that after a recent disagreement, Mr. Grenell combed five years’ worth of the operative’s tweets to fuel an online attack that lasted for weeks
He first came to GOP prominence as an internet troll so that makes some sense. But he’s been a full-blown Trump troll since trump came on the scene:
To his detractors, Mr. Grenell is a caustic opportunist of modest achievement who scaled the heights of an administration in which pit bull partisanship was prized. Susan E. Rice, President Biden’s former domestic policy adviser and a former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, has called him “one of the most nasty, dishonest people I’ve ever encountered.” Brad Chase, Mr. Grenell’s former business partner, who fell out with him over his conversion to Trumpism, said he was a “soulless, shameless sellout.”
To his supporters, Mr. Grenell is a loyal, tireless messenger for Mr. Trump who transmits the former president’s demands with an efficient bellicosity that stifles naysayers.
“President Trump trusts him as a pair of safe hands in deconstructing the administrative state and confronting the deep state,” Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump strategist and host of the “War Room” podcast, said in a brief interview. “There’s so much that’s got to be taken apart and jettisoned.”
Here’s his foreign policy vision:
Mr. Grenell has spent the past three and a half years leveraging his Balkan contacts in business ventures, including with an important partner — Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law — and that he brings a bombastic bravado to American diplomacy held in high regard by the former president.
“If you want to avoid war, you better have a son of a bitch as the secretary of state,” Mr. Grenell said in a March episode of “Self Centered,” a current events podcast. America needs a “tough” chief diplomat, he said, “who goes in to these tables and says: ‘Guys, if we don’t solve this here, if we don’t represent peace and figure out a tough way, I’ve got to take this file, go back to the United States and transfer it to the secretary of defense, who doesn’t negotiate. He’s going to bomb you.’”
Here’s a NY Times gift link to read the rest of this, which includes his massive conflicts of interests, particularly in the Balkans and other places in the Russian sphere of interest. It’s worth your time. He’s a monster and he’s going to be in charge of Trump’s foreign policy and any other dirty work Trump wants done if he wins.