Personnel Is Policy: Trump Far More Than Bush Is Relying on Movement Conservatives
The most recent Council for National Policy meeting was highly revealing, and a breath of fresh air.
by Rod D. Martin
November 28, 2016
The Council for National Policy is the nucleus of what Hillary termed “the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy”. It gathers the leaders of the Conservative Movement regularly. It goes out of its way to carry the Reagan flame.
That never sat well with Establishment Republicans, the former “Rockefeller Republicans” today known as RINOs. Those who court their favor are also wary.
But it turns out that Donald Trump absolutely loves the crowd at CNP, which was certainly not a likely outcome in the days when no one was quite sure what he believed, or later when the group rallied strongly behind Ted Cruz.
If there’s anything truly different about CNP in the Trump era, vs. CNP in the Bush era, it’s that in the Bush years, CNP was taken very seriously yet held at arm’s length. There was always representation from the White House: we’d get cabinet members for insider briefings pretty regularly. But unlike the Reagan heyday, there was “them” and there was “us”.
No more.
I posted the following to Facebook. It captures things incredibly well:
I hesitated to post this. But I think I need to. You need to know.
Many of us have worried a lot out loud about whether Donald Trump is serious about governing as a conservative. Mark Levin correctly points out that at least 80% of his policy positions are the most conservative of any Presidential nominee since Reagan. Tony Perkins correctly states that Trump actively worked to pass the most conservative party platform…ever.
But personnel is policy. That's where the rubber meets the road.
There is a small group of which we are longtime members, that meets privately on a regular basis. If you're a high level conservative donor, group head, or politician, there's a pretty good chance you're part of it. And by that, I don't mean RINOs. I mean real conservatives. Names you know and names you'll never know, the makers of our movement.
The speaker at the dinner at which this picture was taken was supposed to be Jeff Sessions. But he got a little busy with having just been appointed Attorney General a couple hours earlier.
So at the last minute, our Executive Director called up these four members (in the picture) of the Executive Committee of Trump's Transition Team to do an impromptu panel.
Not "called on the phone". Called out of the audience.
Four out of twelve Transition Team Executive Committee members is a lot. But there were four more present.
The reason I'm telling you this is that so far at least, Donald Trump is naming the best of our best, not just to the positions you're hearing about, but to the positions that pick those positions. Maybe that'll change. But it is absolutely extraordinary, not least in how different it is from any Republican nominee since Reagan.
And I thought you should know.
As you can see, to Tony Perkins’ left are Bill Walton (vetting all economic policy appointments), Ken Blackwell (head of the domestic transition), Ed Meese (over judiciary, among other things), and Becky Norton Dunlop, who is sort of in charge of staffing…everything.
Kellyanne Conway is, of course, on the CNP Executive Committee. So is Ken Blackwell. In July, Mike Flynn and K.T. McFarland did our security briefing: now they’re NSA and Deputy NSA.
Indeed, it seems that half the CNP Executive Committee and a rather large percentage of the room as a whole are fully inside.
This is not at all what many feared. This bodes very, very well.