Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney told SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily that the trillion-dollar continuing resolution’s increase in military spending is “important,” and the increase in border security spending sends an “important signal of where the administration seeks to go,” but both are “fairly modest down payments” on President Trump’s agenda.
Gaffney said it was important to remember that “a vastly larger bill is coming due because of the huge damage that was done in both departments by the previous administration.”
“I really considered it a wrecking, and Donald Trump has got to pick up the pieces,” he said. “He’s making the right noises about that, and I think these are important, if modest, first steps in the right direction.”
“As to whether they offset the other problems you’ve been describing, Alex, is a matter of taste and political judgment – especially a judgment as to whether, come September, things are going to be different,” he added. “I’m given to thinking that in Washington, we’re often told that a couple of months from now, we’re going to be stronger and better-looking and smarter and richer and able to leap tall buildings, where we just can’t do it right now. It rarely turns out to be the case that any of those things eventuate, so I’m a little skeptical on that score.”
Marlow observed that justifications for the big-spending budget resolution from congressional Republicans and the White House amount to saying that Democrats drove a very hard bargain, using the filibuster and threats of a resulting government shutdown as leverage.
“As long as the Senate requires 60 votes to move legislation, Alex – and this is something the president has tweeted about yesterday, and others, including a good friend of mine, Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona, have been warning about – this is going to be the vehicle that the Democrats will use,” Gaffney agreed. “Yes, they do drive hard bargains, but they also are very disciplined. They are unrelenting, and they’re playing to their base to a far greater degree, I think, than Republicans are doing – or at least President Trump is at the moment.”
“As one of the principal conduits to that base, I think it’s important that you be doing what you’re doing. As our friend Steve Bannon said at CPAC a few months back: to hold the administration accountable when it does deviate from some of its promises in the interest of accommodating what some are calling ‘President Schumer,’ I’m sorry to say,” Gaffney added, referring to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Marlow turned to national security matters, reporting that the United States has issued a new terror alert for Americans traveling to Europe during the summer.
“It’s obviously an ominous sign of things to come,” Gaffney said. “We’re witnessing the underlying situation degrade. It’s not just the symptoms of increased jihadism or the threat of an attack here or there, tourists being particularly targeted. It is that in societies throughout Europe now – most especially Western Europe, where predominantly because of the vast numbers of unassimilable migrants that have been brought in, most of them from parts of the Muslim world – you now have both the violent kind of jihad, but even more worrying, the infrastructure that enables that violent jihad. And that is the complexes of mosques and Islamic societies and cultural centers and various front groups and no-go zones – yes, there are effectively no-go zones, enclaves that have become so dominated by these sharia supremacists that the authorities fear to censor them, let alone to enforce the laws of the nation upon them.”
“These are the things that I think are going to cause greater and greater dangers, both to Europeans and to those of us who love being able to be in those countries. And in due course – this is really the key point – in due course, this is the same trajectory, for want of a better term, sharia supremacists have in mind for this country as well. We’re not as far down the tubes as the Europeans are. The numbers of Muslims are not as bad. But that’s the same endpoint they have in mind for us as well,” he warned.
Marlow asked for Gaffney’s take on President Trump’s saying he would be willing to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un under the right circumstances.
Gaffney said he personally found it a “dubious idea” because he fears the president has “become absorbed, shall we say, with what is always a temptation in the Oval Office, and that is to think that by virtue of your personal charm and your ability to relate directly – most recently in the person of his newfound friend, the president of China, Xi Jinping – that somehow you’ll be able to sort of overcome the past history, but more to the point, the national interests of hostile nations, as they’re perceived by their leadership.”
“I think that Kim Jong-un is unlikely to be moved by Donald Trump’s personal persuasion in the setting of a summit. More to the point, I’m very, very uncomfortable with the kind of legitimacy that that would confer on one of the most heinous dictators,” he said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.