Trump’s Foreign-Policy Influencers

But beyond the noise of the campaign trail, one way to gauge the possible foreign-policy agenda of a second Trump term is to profile the key national security thinkers in his orbit: Who are the advisors he listens to? What is the genesis of the ideas that animate the former president’s current worldview?

Consider the list below a handy guide in the days and weeks leading up to Nov. 5. But first, a few disclaimers. The men listed below (and yes, they’re all men—the picks reflect what our sources told us) are ranked not in order of importance but in alphabetical order. The names are not earmarked for any particular roles, such as national security advisor or secretary of state; we thought it best to just describe the people whose views and ideas could have a meaningful impact on Trump’s foreign-policy decisions. And lastly, the spirit of this endeavor is to add some texture to what is a common parlor game in Washington these days—nobody, of course, can actually claim to know exactly what Trump will do.

And now, here’s the list you came here for.—The Editors

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Elbridge Colby

Elbridge Colby, a once and possible future Trump administration defense official, is the loudest and perhaps most cogent voice in Washington advocating a complete shift away from Europe, NATO, and Russia and toward the growing challenge from China.

Colby served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense for more than a year in the Trump administration, where he helped put teeth into the belated U.S. pivot to Asia. He then joined with other Trump administration veterans to co-found the Marathon Initiative, a Washington-based think tank focused on great-power competition. If he gets another shot in a future Trump administration—and his name has been floated for another defense position or even a job with the National Security Council—he would hammer home his overarching point: China, not Russia, is America’s biggest problem.

In a series of articles, books, and speeches, Colby has for years made the case for the United States to use its limited defense resources to prevent a hostile hegemonic power from gaining ascendancy over the Asia-Pacific region. China has already economically cowed many of its smaller neighbors, and it continues to chip away at regional security in places such as the South China Sea. But Taiwan is the real test: A Chinese effort to reincorporate the island by force would mean a conflict with the United States and likely Japan—and, if successful, would open China up to domination of the entire Pacific Basin, the world’s most important economic region by far.

Colby’s ideas are a timely reprisal of one of the original blueprints of U.S. grand strategy, written by Nicholas Spykman in the middle of World War II, but turned on its head: Asia, not Europe, is now the economic and political center of gravity of the world, and its domination by Beijing would severely constrain America’s future prospects and freedom of action.

One problem for Colby is that his potential future boss, while willing to be plenty hostile to China at times, is also utterly transactional, and Trump has already signaled his willingness to barter away Taiwan’s autonomy. Realist hawks such as Colby tend to sit uncomfortably with a foreign policy that has no true north.

Another problem is that Colby’s vocal and repeated urgings to use limited U.S. resources exclusively for the big China fight that may one day come, even if that means abandoning Ukraine in the middle of a war, are grist for the Kremlin’s goons; Russian state television cheers Colby’s foreign-policy priorities.

Lawmakers may not buy an Asia-only defense strategy anyway, in a future Trump administration or a future Kamala Harris one. A congressionally mandated defense review panel argued in July that the United States should prepare to defend its vital interests in both Europe and Asia.

—Keith Johnson

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Fred Fleitz

Despite being a longtime member of the U.S. national security community, Fred Fleitz is a hard-nosed proponent of the Trump-driven anti-establishment MAGA ideology that roiled Washington for four years. Fleitz is a Trump administration veteran who has emerged as one of the former president’s few top advisors on national security on the campaign trail.

Fleitz, alongside Keith Kellogg, drafted a plan for Trump to review aimed at ending the war in Ukraine if Trump wins reelection. The plan entails pushing Ukraine and Russia to come to the negotiating table and brokering a temporary cease-fire at the current battle lines, which would be sustained during the peace talks. The Trump administration would pressure Ukraine on one side by threatening to cut off U.S. aid if it didn’t negotiate, and Russia on the other by threatening to open the floodgates on U.S. military aid to Ukraine without peace talks. The proposal marks the most detailed preview yet of what a Trump White House’s Ukraine policy could look like if Fleitz and others in his orbit joined the administration.

Fleitz is vice chair of the Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute, the think tank founded in 2021 to keep MAGA boots on the ground in Washington as Team Biden took power. He is a regular commentator on the right-wing news channel NewsMax and the author of Obamabomb: A Dangerous and Growing National Security Fraud and The Coming North Korea Nuclear Nightmare: What Trump Must Do to Reverse Obama’s ‘Strategic Patience.’

Fleitz has garnered controversy over his past comments and affiliations with hard-right and anti-immigrant groups that opponents refer to as fringe and Islamophobic. (He later distanced himself from some of those past affiliations.)

Fleitz spent more than two decades working in the U.S. government, bouncing between posts at the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, State Department, and the Republican side of the House Intelligence Committee. For significant chunks of his career, he circled the orbit of the pugnacious neoconservative hawk John Bolton, serving as his chief of staff in the George W. Bush administration when Bolton was the undersecretary of state for arms control, and then later as the National Security Council chief of staff when Bolton was Trump’s national security advisor.

Bolton has since broken very publicly with Trump, but Fleitz remains nestled in the MAGA world. While Trump has given no indication of who would staff his administration if he won, many Republican insiders say Fleitz is near the top of the list.

—Robbie Gramer

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Ric Grenell 

Within hours of presenting his diplomatic credentials to German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in 2018, Trump’s new ambassador to Berlin, Ric Grenell, took to Twitter to demand that German companies doing business with Iran should “wind down operations immediately.” The diplomatic relationship went downhill from there.

Disagreements with the German government were aired publicly, as Grenell—a political appointee—threatened to withdraw U.S. troops from Germany over the country’s lackluster defense spending and impose sanctions over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would have increased the country’s dependency on Russian energy. Wolfgang Kubicki, the vice president of the German Parliament, at one point accused Grenell of acting as if the United States was “still an occupying power.”

The pugilistic diplomat’s approach may have horrified Berlin’s mild-mannered political establishment. But if ambassadors are judged by their ability to convey their boss’s message, Grenell was an effective foot soldier. He was later appointed as the special envoy to the Balkans—where he was accused of causing the government of Kosovo to collapse—and acting director of national intelligence, becoming the first openly gay person to hold a cabinet-level position.

A graduate of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Grenell worked as a spokesperson for a number of prominent Republicans before joining the 2000 presidential campaign of former Sen. John McCain—who would later become one of Trump’s most vehement critics.

From 2001-2008, Grenell served as the director of communications for the U.S. mission to the United Nations under four ambassadors, including John Bolton, who would go on to serve as Trump’s national security advisor.

Long before the Trump presidency, Grenell was known for his combative tweets—which, like those of his future boss, often took swipes at journalists and mocked the appearance of prominent women Democrats.

While several senior figures in the Trump administration broke with the former president during the ignominious end to his tenure, Grenell remained loyal. In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Grenell was dispatched to Nevada to help challenge the results of the vote—despite knowing that there was no basis to the claims, according to a recent profile in the New York Times.

Since leaving government, Grenell has served as Trump’s envoy, traversing the world, meeting with far-right leaders, and undercutting the State Department—including in Guatemala. It’s that loyalty that is likely to land him a senior foreign-policy job in a future Trump administration.

A secretary of state needs to be “tough” and a “son of a bitch,” Grenell said during an appearance on the Self Centered podcast in March.

—Amy Mackinnon

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Keith Kellogg

When Michael Flynn was fired from his role as U.S. national security advisor just 22 days into Trump’s first term after lying about conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Keith Kellogg was one of the first people considered to replace him. He didn’t get the job, which went to another three-star Army officer: H.R. McMaster. Instead, Kellogg advised Vice President Mike Pence and served as the chief of staff to the National Security Council.

In those roles, Kellogg was caught up in some of the most pivotal moments of Trump’s presidency. Kellogg said he heard “nothing wrong or improper” on the July 2019 call where Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden. And Kellogg privately urged Pence to certify the 2020 election “TONIGHT” while a pro-Trump mob was still being cleared from the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But Kellogg nonetheless endorsed Trump over Pence in August 2023, criticizing Pence for concentrating on “political maneuvering” and his image. (Pence withdrew from the presidential race in October 2023 and has not endorsed Trump.)

Since then, Kellogg has sought to become a key member of Trump’s national security brain trust at the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank that is seen in Washington as a White House in waiting. Kellogg—a Vietnam War veteran who was serving as a three-star Army general in the Pentagon when al Qaeda flew a Boeing 757 into the west side of the building on Sept. 11, 2001—is at once pro-Ukraine and pro-NATO and yet willing to exact Trump’s famous brand of leverage on both. He’s tried to put teeth behind Trump’s pledge to end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine “in a day,” mapping out a plan that would cut U.S. military aid to Ukraine if Kyiv refused to go to the bargaining table, but boost it if the Kremlin refused to negotiate.

At the July NATO summit in Washington, where European officials sought out Trump insiders, Kellogg was one former official taking meetings with U.S. allies. But the message they got might not have been the one that they wanted to hear. Kellogg has said that NATO countries that don’t meet the alliance’s defense spending target are violating the Washington Treaty (Trump threatened at a campaign rally earlier this year not to defend NATO allies that weren’t hitting the bloc’s spending mark of 2 percent of GDP ).

—Jack Detsch

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Robert Lighthizer

Few members of the Trump administration still maintain a large degree of influence on policy. But Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s trade representative, current advisor, and perhaps future Treasury secretary, has become such an influential economic voice, especially through his back-to-the-past vision of trade, that he has helped shape the Biden administration’s newfound love of trade wars.

Lighthizer, a longtime trade lawyer who began his public service career in the Ronald Reagan administration, turned Trump’s inchoate notions on trade and the economy into a more or less coherent policy. Now, with Trump campaigning to return to the White House, Lighthizer is eager to double down on the policies he pursued the first time around.

Those famous Trump tariffs—on steel, aluminum, and many products from China—were the fruit of Lighthizer’s vision, and he was just getting started. He believes raising taxes on American consumers and businesses for things they import will make them import less; in an ideal world, it would also make American businesses manufacture and export more things as well.

His plans for the future, as laid out in books and writings since he left office, include much higher tariffs on a bigger range of countries (all of them, actually) in order to balance the ledger of American imports and exports, with a particular eye on China—one of America’s biggest trading partners and its top geopolitical rival. Ultimately, his objective is to get much closer to full “decoupling” from China than the lukewarm and partial “de-risking” now favored by the Biden team.

It’s of little concern to Lighthizer and some of Trump’s other still-influential trade advisors such as Peter Navarro (who was released from prison in July) that the avalanche of tariffs and belligerent trade policy achieved none of their stated aims. The trade deficit, the main concern for tariff hawks such as Trump and Lighthizer, grew under their watch. U.S. exports shrank, as did, in the end, manufacturing jobs (thanks to COVID-19).

Retaliatory tariffs by friends and allies curbed U.S. trade options abroad and weakened the prospects for an anti-China coalition. Consumer prices, juiced by import taxes, rose. China did not moderate any of the predatory economic behavior that prompted the trade wars in the first place, and in fact has made its own form of turbocharged, export-driven industrial policy the very centerpiece of its own economic rejuvenation.

But, as Lighthizer himself has argued, it takes time to right a ship that’s on the wrong course. Maybe this time the same old remedies will produce dramatically different results.

—Keith Johnson

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Johnny McEntee

In the summer of 2020, as Trump was running for reelection, an email from the White House invited Pentagon officials to sit down for interviews with a pair of staffers, where they would be evaluated for positions in a second Trump administration. After a spate of high-profile resignations in the building as the White House increasingly sought to assert itself over the Defense Department, officials saw the interviews as a test of loyalty to Trump.

The man behind the email was White House Presidential Personnel Office Director John McEntee. A onetime walk-on quarterback at the University of Connecticut, McEntee served as the president’s “body man” for the first year of the administration. He was fired by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly in 2018 for failing a background check due to a gambling investigation, only to return two years later, this time in charge of the powerful personnel office.

It’s often said in Washington that personnel is policy. Many of Trump’s early appointments came from the traditional Republican foreign-policy pool: more international, pro-trade, pro-NATO, and pro-ally than the standard MAGA crowd. Kelly, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson formed the “axis of adults” that largely controlled the levers of foreign policy for Trump’s first two years in office—even as the commander in chief finger-wagged at Washington’s perceived “deep state” for allegedly slow-walking his agenda.

But late in the game, McEntee would help get MAGA-approved people into top jobs. He helped orchestrate Trump’s reshuffling of the Pentagon brass, including the firing of then-U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper. He also tried, with others, to stack the Pentagon’s top policy boards with close Trump allies. Had Trump won, McEntee would have played a key role in trying to implement Trump’s planned “Schedule F” reforms that would have essentially turned tenure-track government jobs into at-will employees.

Since then, loyalty tests have become standard practice in Trump world. McEntee is now at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, where he’s helping to spearhead Project 2025—an initiative that calls for the next president to “confront the Deep State.” If you want in on a list of would-be Trump appointees, you have to send in your phone number and fill out a detailed questionnaire, largely predicated on loyalty to Trump.

—Jack Detsch

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Christopher Miller

Christopher Miller had some early missteps after being named Trump’s acting secretary of defense in November 2020—literally. First, he tripped on his way up the steps and into the Pentagon. And then when he got up to give his first public speech at the U.S. Army’s national museum two days later, he forgot his prepared remarks under his seat.

It set the tone for perhaps the wildest two-month tour that any Pentagon chief has ever had. Trump moved Miller from the National Counterterrorism Center to take over for Esper as acting secretary of defense. Trump announced via tweet that Esper had been fired, less than 48 hours after the networks began calling the presidential election for Biden.

Miller, a former Green Beret, was given an ambitious lame-duck agenda for the Pentagon ahead of Biden’s inauguration. The Pentagon was tasked with withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia—all in the course of two months.

Miller faced widespread criticism for his failure to approve the deployment of the National Guard to contain the Jan. 6, 2021, pro-Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol for more than three hours after the Pentagon became aware of the breach. Miller said later that he feared creating “the greatest Constitutional crisis” since the Civil War by deploying active-duty U.S. troops. He has also said that Trump deserves blame for stoking the riots—but he hasn’t explicitly ruled out working for him again.

“I thought he was really good,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt in a December interview, describing Miller and his short stint at the Pentagon. “I thought he was very good.”

—Jack Detsch

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Stephen Miller 

Throughout Trump’s term, Stephen Miller made a name for himself as the radical architect of the president’s hard-line—and highly controversial—immigration policies. If Trump triumphs in November, he is widely expected to again lean heavily on Miller, who has already outlined sweeping new proposals to overhaul U.S. policy and crack down on immigration.

As Trump’s then-senior advisor and speechwriting chief, Miller played a pivotal role in shaping his presidential agenda. He drove forward some of the former U.S. leader’s most contentious schemes, including his family separation policy, known as zero tolerance, and the so-called Muslim ban, which barred travel and refugee resettlement from several Muslim-majority countries to the United States. Beyond pushing to slash refugee admission numbers, he reportedly also wanted to deploy troops to close off the United States’ southern border and proposed banning student visas for Chinese nationals.

Miller was known for encouraging some of Trump’s more hard-line positions, even in situations where other advisors reportedly urged the president to exercise restraint. In 2019, Miller came under fire after a batch of leaked emails published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy group, revealed that he privately touted white nationalist views. The emails, which were exchanged between Miller and conservative news site Breitbart News, date back to 2015 and 2016.

Today, Miller spends much of his time waging legal battles against “woke corporations,” despite having no formal legal training. In 2021, he founded the America First Legal Foundation, a conservative legal advocacy organization focused on challenging the Biden administration and the practices of private companies, including Kellogg and Starbucks. “America First Legal is holding corporate America accountable for illegally engaging in discriminatory employment practices that penalize Americans based on race and sex,” the company said.

If Trump defeats Harris in November, Miller has vowed an overhaul of U.S. immigration policy. “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” he told the New York Times. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

Under a potential second Trump term, Washington would dramatically expand policies aimed at cracking down on immigration, including by halting the U.S. refugee program and reinstalling some variation of the Muslim travel ban, the New York Times reported. Trump envisions conducting sweeping public workplace raids, enacting mass deportations, and constructing “vast holding facilities” to detain those awaiting deportation, Miller said. The former U.S. leader is also eager to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, he said.

“I don’t care what the hell happens in this world,” Miller told right-wing personality Charlie Kirk in a podcast interview earlier this year. “If President Trump gets reelected, the border’s going to be sealed, the military will be deployed, the National Guard will be activated, and the illegals are going home.”

—Christina Lu

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Robert O’Brien

Trump cycled through three national security advisors during the first two years of his tenure before settling on one who fit just right: Robert O’Brien. He stuck around for the remainder of Trump’s presidency.

A Los Angeles lawyer, O’Brien began his White House role as special envoy for hostage affairs. He helped to secure the release of Americans from prisons in Turkey and Yemen, as the Trump administration prioritized the plight of Americans wrongfully detained abroad.

More memorably, O’Brien led the administration’s efforts to lobby Sweden, an ally, to release the American rapper A$AP Rocky following a request from the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, according to the New York Times. Rocky had been convicted on assault charges.

As national security advisor, O’Brien had significantly less experience than his predecessors. He proved to be low-key and loyal, and served out the remainder of the Trump administration without major controversy.

In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, O’Brien became one of the first senior Trump officials to acknowledge, if grudgingly, that Biden had won the vote. “If the Biden-Harris ticket is determined to be the winner, and obviously things look that way now, we’ll have a very professional transition from the National Security Council. There’s no question about it,” he said at a virtual meeting of the Global Security Forum.

O’Brien has remained close with the former president and is likely to be tapped for a senior role should Trump return to the Oval Office.

In an essay in Foreign Affairs published in June, O’Brien sketched out the contours of a future Trump foreign policy: “A Trumpian restoration of peace through strength.” China is the primary focus, as O’Brien calls for a muscular posture in the Indo-Pacific, including the deployment of the entire Marine Corps to the region and for a U.S. aircraft carrier to be transferred from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

O’Brien also advocated for the United States to resume nuclear weapons testing, not carried out since 1992. “Washington must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992—not just by using computer models,” O’Brien wrote.

—Amy Mackinnon

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Kash Patel

Kash Patel had a meteoric ascent during Trump’s tenure, rising from little-known staffer on the House Intelligence Committee to chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense in the last months of the administration, despite having no military background. As an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, who was then chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Patel was central to efforts to challenge accusations that the Trump team had inappropriate contact with Russian government officials while on the campaign trail.

Patel was reportedly the lead author of a controversial 2018 memo that alleged that law enforcement officials had acted improperly when they sought permission to surveil the communications of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. While Democrats slammed the decision to release the document, describing it as a partisan attack on the justice system, a court later found that some of the surveillance warrants against Page were unjustified.

After a stint at the National Security Council as senior director for counterterrorism, Patel moved to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2020 as a senior advisor to the director of national intelligence, where he became integral to the former president’s attacks on the intelligence community, pressing for declassification of documents from the investigation into Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

In the waning days of the Trump administration, the former president reportedly considered firing CIA Deputy Director Vaughn Bishop and replacing him with Patel, according to Axios. If then-CIA Director Gina Haspel resigned in protest—which she threatened to do—Patel or another Trump ally would be appointed to lead the sprawling intelligence agency, according to reports.

Patel would likely play an integral and senior role should Trump return to the Oval Office. In an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast in December, Patel said a second Trump administration would target and prosecute journalists. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out,” he said.

Patel has also authored a children’s book titled The Plot Against the King, a revisionist fairy-tale rendering of the Russia investigation in which Patel appears as a wizard who informs the kingdom that King Donald “did not work with the Russonians.”

—Amy Mackinnon

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Mike Pompeo 

Mike Pompeo was one of the few Trump cabinet officials to maintain a strong relationship with the brash and mercurial president throughout his term in office. Trump plucked Pompeo from relative obscurity as a Kansas congressman to be his first CIA director. As head of the premier U.S. intelligence agency, Pompeo forayed into diplomacy by secretly traveling to North Korea to lay the groundwork for direct talks between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

In 2018, as Trump sacked his first secretary of state, Tillerson, he announced Pompeo as his replacement. Pompeo joined the State Department vowing to restore “swagger” to the diplomatic corps after the Tillerson era, prompting relief among some longtime diplomats and eye rolls from others. While at the State Department, Pompeo was careful to ensure he remained a top player in Trump’s inner circle, even when it put him at odds with the embattled diplomatic corps—during Trump’s tumultuous first impeachment hearing, for example, and other scandals involving harassment, mismanagement, and watchdog investigations into Trump appointees at the State Department.

Pompeo, a California native, graduated first in his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, served as a U.S. Army officer, and attended law school at Harvard. He moved to Kansas in the 1990s and served as a member of Congress for the state’s 4th district from 2011 to 2017 before joining the Trump administration. After Trump was voted out of office, Pompeo did not join other top Trump administration officials in condemning the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump’s demonstrably false claims of election fraud.

Pompeo briefly toyed with the idea of running for president but bowed out of the race early on when he failed to raise his national profile or as much money as other Republican challengers to Trump like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. In June, he established a new private equity firm with veteran financiers that aims to back mid-sized technology companies.

Pompeo still maintains close ties with Trump and his inner circle, and many Republican insiders believe he would be a top contender for a senior administration role, such as secretary of defense, if Trump is reelected.

In Trump’s circle, Pompeo is among the most outspoken advocates of Ukraine. He visited Kyiv in early April and told Fox News that arming Ukraine was the “least costly way to move forward.” Many European officials believe that the appointment of Pompeo to a senior cabinet position would be a good thing for Ukraine and NATO, and bad news for Russia.

An ardent hawk, he was also a primary driver of Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and architect of the former president’s muscular approach to China that now largely has bipartisan backing.

—Robbie Gramer

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