Rich Higgins is the quintessential American patriot.
A tough, blunt-spoken guy from the streets of Boston, he began his career as an Army bomb technician in the 1990s. He went from screening visitors to the Clinton White House, looking for hidden explosives, to clearing IEDs in Iraq, to working in the Trump administration as a national security expert, worrying about metaphorical boobytraps set by Obama holdovers and Deep State seditionists.
Higgins’ new book, “The Memo: 20 Years Inside the Deep State Fighting for America First,” is an eye-opening and unique book for a political memoir. It is not heavy on political wonkiness, policymaking stratagems, and personal vendettas typical of Washington, DC tell-alls. It is a refreshingly direct tale of a talented young man’s rise from the enlisted ranks of the military into politics and then policy-making, only to discover the realities of a brutal and seditious opposition fighting to preserve a decrepit, America-destroying agenda that culminated in an outrageous coup attempt against a U.S. president.
And while Higgins does “name names” in his book, when describing the subversion of the Trump agenda by those inimical to it, he does so only to drive home his larger point about the incredible obstacles President Trump has faced in orienting U.S. policies toward advancing his America-first agenda.
Higgins spent many years in the military, first in on-the-ground technical roles, then later devising tactics and strategies for combating the IED menace, and finally teaching at the National Defense University. Through a combination of intelligence, drive and strongly held convictions about the innate goodness of America, and the innate evil of cultural Marxists, Higgins rose to become a member of the National Security Council staff of the new Trump administration, in the area of strategic planning, focusing on Islam and communism. He had worked as a surrogate on the Trump campaign, speaking to various groups and providing briefings on counterterrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His talents were then brought to bear in the White House on the NSC.
What Higgins quickly discerned at the outset of the Trump administration in early 2017, however, was that there were only a relative handful (six or seven) fellow staffers on the NSC who truly believed in Trump’s MAGA philosophy. Meanwhile, there were 60 or 70 Obama holdovers, and many, many individuals on the NSC staff who sought to undermine Trump’s agenda, either overtly or covertly, actively or passively.
Higgins is not one to go along to get along. So in his off-hours he set about preparing an unclassified memo for the president – The Memo, for which the book is eponymously titled – laying out what he saw as the political forces operating against President Trump, both within his administration and within the culture more broadly, which he feared would undo this president and his agenda. Each chapter of the book ends with an excerpt from the memo hitting on the theme that Higgins addresses in that particular chapter.
One of the appeals of this book is that it is written for Everyman, or Every American, with a view toward opening their eyes to the enormous challenge President Trump has faced in taking on a Washington establishment, crossing both Democratic and Republican party lines, which is self-interestedly desperate to maintain the huge gusher of federal money and power that flows from it.
Higgins disdains both major political parties. Though avowedly conservative, he despises the Republican establishment as much as, or perhaps more than, the Democratic Party. At least the latter are open about their Marxist inclinations, their dislike of traditional American values, and their desire for America to be subsumed into a new, globalist world order, loss of liberties be damned. The Republicans, in his view, merely feign adherence to the principles of fiscal prudence, control of our nation’s borders, and the maintenance of US sovereignty. Meanwhile, the Republicans go along with the Democratic agenda, which includes open borders, non-stop spending, and endless wars.
Higgin writes, “The irony was… I was a pure, pedigreed member of the Deep State and had been working in it, and on the front lines of its campaigns, for the past two decades.”
This book, and more like it, are exactly what the American public needs. The truth about the dysfunction of Washington is being revealed, and epitomized, every day by the breathtaking (but not really) corruption of Joe and Hunter Biden, and it seems the whole Biden clan. Their shocking degree of corruption is being exposed thanks to the crack-addled Hunter abandoning a laptop with another Everyman – a computer repairman in Delaware. How fitting! (That is not to dismiss the importance of the trickle, turning into a flood, of revelations emerging from Hunter Biden’s associates, Tony Bobulinski and the imprisoned Bevon Cooney. How many other complicit actors in Joe and Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling schemes will abandon the USS Joe Biden before that ship sinks beneath the waves?)
HR McMaster, the National Security Advisor for whom Higgins worked, and who ultimately fired Higgins once he had ferreted him out as the author of his memo trying to warn Trump of the seditionists surrounding him, turned out to be one of the Deep State players seeking to maintain the status quo and oppose Trump’s plans. Sadly, as Higgins makes clear, the most fundamental mistake Trump had made was in relying on the Republican establishment to populate his administration. As Higgins says, in Washington, personnel is policy.
Higgins recounts a rumination that he had in the afterglow of Trump’s election in 2016, as he was on a train heading back to Washington from New York, about what the media missed in Trump’s shocking victory: “That missing thing was… well, guys like me. Like my family. Working class guys. White, Black, Hispanic. The guys who fix your plumbing when it’s broken. The guys who work in a factory.”
Those people did not vote for the Washington establishment in 2016. They voted for Donald J. Trump and his MAGA agenda. He has held remarkably firm in the face of withering opposition, including from within. Rich Higgins still supports him, and so do I. Let’s hope the American people continue to show their support on November 3.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for more than 33 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times and The Federalist. Follow him on Parler and Twitter at @BillMarshallDC1. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)
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