The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has been dismissive of calls for supporting the Ukraine government as it fights an ongoing Russian-led intervention. Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, worked as a lobbyist for the Russian-backed former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych for more than a decade.

Still, Republican delegates at last week’s national security committee platform meeting in Cleveland were surprised when the Trump campaign orchestrated a set of events to make sure that the GOP would not pledge to give Ukraine the weapons it has been asking for from the United States.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-campaign-guts-gops-anti-russia-stance-on-ukraine/2016/07/18/98adb3b0-4cf3-11e6-a7d8-13d06b37f256_story.html

This little novice went to market . . . in Baghdad Jan 31, 2004

At Yale University, Jay Hallen majored in political science, rarely watched financial news channels and didn't follow the stockmarket.

All of which made the 24-year-old an unlikely pick for the difficult task of rebuilding Iraq's shattered stock exchange. But Hallen, a private-sector development officer for the United States-led Coalition Provisional Authority, was given the job immediately after arriving in Baghdad last September.

Hallen admits that he wound up in Iraq rather by accident. In 2002, he began pursuing a White House job and, though none materialised, he stayed in close contact with the man who interviewed him, Reuben Jeffrey. When Jeffrey went to Iraq last summer as a senior economic development adviser, Hallen emailed to ask whether there were any job openings. "Be careful what you wish for," Jeffrey, who is now an aide to Iraqi administrator Paul Bremer, told him in reply.

A few weeks later, Hallen got a phone call from a Pentagon personnel officer, who told him he had been given a job in the Coalition Provisional Authority starting in Baghdad in less than a month. "Needless to say, I was in a mild state of shock," he says.

https://www.afr.com/companies/manufacturing/this-little-novice-went-to-market-in-baghdad-20040131-k294j

In Iraq, the Job Opportunity of a Lifetime
By Ariana Eunjung ChaMay 23, 2004

When the U.S. government went looking for people to help rebuild Iraq, they had responded to the call. They supported the war effort and President Bush. Many had strong Republican credentials. They were in their twenties or early thirties and had no foreign service experience. On that first day, Oct. 1, they knew so little about how things worked that they waited hours at the airport for a ride that was never coming. They finally discovered the shuttle bus out of the airport but got off at the wrong stop.

They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country's $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis.

Others from across the District responded affirmatively to the same e-mail, for different reasons. Andrew Burns, 23, a Red Cross volunteer who had taught English in rural China, felt going to Iraq would help him pursue a career in humanitarian aid. Todd Baldwin, 28, a legislative aide for Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), thought the opportunity was too good to pass up. John Hanley, 24, a Web site editor, wanted to break into the world of international relations. Anita Greco, 25, a former teacher, and Casey Wasson, 23, a recent college graduate in government, just needed jobs.

For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/05/23/in-iraq-the-job-opportunity-of-a-lifetime/56eed6e7-f407-4d97-a29e-f6b8cbc88301/

DeSantis has had troubles with Nazis over the past few years that he's been in office. In 2023, he hired a speechwriter with ties to neo-Nazis. After DeSantis waged war with Disney, neo-Nazis began protesting outside the park south of Orlando. The move came after a number of neo-Nazi groups started popping up around the state.

At least one columnist has warned that no one should ever expect DeSantis to denounce neo-Nazis or white supremacists.

Ironically, one neo-Nazi told a reporter that groups use "woke grievances" to recruit angry white men to their cause.

https://www.rawstory.com/ron-desantis-delets-video/

Meanwhile, behind the scenes he’s pressuring Mike Pence to do something Mike Pence clearly had no authority to do, something Eastman conceded he didn’t want the Supreme Court weighing in on, because of how he knew they would have laughed it out of their courtroom.

Pence’s chief of staff started to get worried for Pence’s safety on January 5, when Trump told Pence that he was going to have to “publicly criticize him.”

Trump told his advisers on January 5 that the crowd the next day would be “angry.”

And Trump kept lying and tweeting and saying Mike Pence could change the outcome of the election, and he kept ginning them up and kept ginning them up.