RNA - For the better part of a year, Donald Trump has been advised by Michael Flynn, a registered Democrat and retired general who has held various posts in the Bush and Obama administrations.
Two weeks ago, Flynn was rewarded for his loyalty with a top position in the Trump administration-to-be, as Trump’s national security advisor. This position gives him a voice in the president’s ear and a seat on the somewhat amorphous National Security Council (NSC). While the NSC was originally established in 1947 to simply advise the president on national security, in the decades since its power and responsibilities have grown to coordinating the government’s responses to a variety of urgent threats and crises, from pandemics to terrorist attacks.
Flynn’s appointment has already caused much justifiable alarm, given his public persona as an unstable Islamophobe peddling conspiracy theories and fearmongering about the threat of Islamic extremists. A closer look at Flynn’s history reveals a slightly more complex—though no less concerning—picture of the man who has shaped and will continue to shape Trump’s foreign policy.
Before Flynn was the virulent anti-Islam campaigner he is today, he was an ardent critic of the Obama administration’s military-based solutions to the spread of extremism—and before that, he was the architect of the president’s personal paramilitary squad. The question for anyone worried about a future Trump foreign policy is, which Flynn will the world be getting when he steps into the White House come January?
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