Donald Trump has paid tribute to Jack Keane, the retired general whom he will today award the presidential medal of freedom – the highest US honour which Trump recently gave to the rightwing shock jock Rush Limbaugh and will soon bestow upon two leading golfers. Retweeting Keane’s thoughts on the ceremony, Trump said the honour was “well deserved”.
Keane and Trump go back a long way, the four-star general and Fox News analyst, another New Yorker, having twice turned down offers to be Trump’s secretary of defense but having served as an informal adviser.
Keane is a named source for Trump and his Generals, a recent book by Peter Bergen, who writes that the general became “almost a shadow national security adviser” to Trump at a time when the president was notably failing to get on with HR McMaster, the general who officially filled that role.
Bergen, a CNN analyst, recounts Keane telling Trump one way to signal to North Korea he was serious about possible military action over its nuclear weapons programme would be “to stop sending military families to South Korea”. Trump, Bergen writes, subsequently ordered an evacuation of US civilians, sending official aides into a panic.
The order never went through.
Bergen also writes that Keane has not only offered Trump only positive advice. Keane blasted Trump’s infamous summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018 as “stunning and disapponting”; supported the maintenance of a small US force in Afghanistan, against the president’s wishes; and stood against Trump’s urge to pull US troops out of Syria.
Keane seems to have been of more use to Trump than another retired general the president has liked to have around. Keith Kellogg joined the national security council but, according to Bergen, was found to be “lazy, uninformed and not smart”, more likely to be found taking a nap or watching Fox News than doing any foreign policy work.
Should Trump read Bergen’s book, which would admittedly seem unlikely, he might not like one paragraph in particular:
“In the end,” Bergen writes, “the real ‘Deep State’ – retired senior generals such as Keane and officials at the Pentagon and state department – managed to keep many hundreds of American soldiers in Syria.”
The Deep State theory holds that unelected officials are working in concert to thwart Trump’s agenda. Aides to the president and supporters in the media regularly refer to it and it is reportedly one motivation for an attempted political purgeof the federal government.
As another author, James B Stewart, recently wrote, former White House counsellor and Trump campaign chief Steve Bannon, a prime mover in the invention and propagation of the Deep State line, says it is “a conspiracy theory for nut cases”.
