Richard Grenell’s shadow foreign policy campaign is unsettling diplomats and threatens to collapse US interests
For Donald Trump, he is “my envoy”, the man apparently anointed as the former US president’s roving ambassador while he plots a return to the White House.
To critics, he is seen as “an online pest” and “a national disgrace” – and most importantly, the dark embodiment of what foreign policy in a second Trump administration would look like.
Meet Richard Grenell, vocal tribune of Trump’s America First credo on the international stage and the man hotly tipped to become secretary of state if the presumed Republican nominee beats Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.
A senior executive in the rightwing Newsmax cable channel, Grenell, 57, has crafted a persona as the archetypal Trump man, keen and ever-ready to troll liberals, allies and foreign statesmen in public forums and social media.
Grenell – who served as a rambunctious ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term – has carved a niche as the articulator-in-chief of a Maga approach to global affairs that appears to echo his political master’s voice.
The radicalization towards the right is what disturbs me the most. I am a blue collar working class person from a small town in a very conservative province, and I don’t understand at all how everything that’s happened has not radicalized people overwhelmingly towards left wing economics.
I blame most of it on culture war bullshit honestly, but a large part of me is just disappointed in how overwhelmingly stupid and easily manipulated a lot of my friends and family seem to be. The writing is on the wall as far as I can tell. I read a lot of books on economics and history and politics, and I don’t expect everyone to do that, but even before I got into reading about that shit I could tell that something was very wrong with how right wing pundits pushed their shit. It irritates me to no end having to explain these things in person to people I otherwise respect, see them talk about it and internalize it, and then two days later see them devolve right back into the same right wing propagandized mentality. Idk man, it’s disheartening.
I agree, I think the culture war bullshit is somehow effective at radicalization. It probably helps that anyone who is far enough right seems to get funding for their media projects, allowing their shit to spew on every form of media at all hours of the day.
I see the same thing happen, with pushing against far right talking points and having people see the flaws, such as CRT and having explained it is a often a graduate level legal course and then hearing them spew the same talking points with DEI in place of CRT. I’ve given up on deradicalizing my christofascist family, I don’t have the energy to deal with it :(
What irritates me is that I know whatever Ben Shapiro said on his show every week because the exact same words come out of people I know’s mouths that week. It’s such low effort, easily identified propaganda. I don’t understand why it works so well. Like I don’t get it at all.