Over the past few weeks, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has pushed out a handful of National Security Council officials who were holdovers from his predecessor, Michael Flynn, and seen as allied with White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon and his nationalist wing of the Trump administration. The house cleaning started with Rich Higgins, the NSC director of strategic planning and the author of a seven-page memo titled "POTUS & Political Warfare" that was being passed around among likeminded members of President Trump's campaign and transition. When the memo, written in May, was found on Higgins' computer in mid-July, he was told by McMaster's deputy that he could resign or be fired, sources tell Foreign Policy, which published the memo on Thursday.
The memo lays out what Higgins views as the concerted effort to thwart and topple Trump. "While opposition to President Trump manifests itself through political warfare memes centered on cultural Marxist narratives, this hardly means that opposition is limited to Marxists as conventionally understood," he wrote. "Having become the dominant cultural meme, some benefit from it while others are captured by it; including 'deep state' actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans."
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