President Trump's surprise announcement that outgoing congressman Mark Meadows will become his new White House chief of staff is a shot across the bow against the Deep State Obama holdovers who've worked to undermine the Trump administration since the day he was sworn in.

From leaks to the media to eavesdropping to whistleblowing based on secondhand reports on presidential conversations to relentless jabs in the media at the president's competency, "unnamed White House sources" have undermined this president since January of 2017, and that inside-the–White House swamp will be working in high gear during 2020 to help assure Trump's defeat. Choosing a new chief who has already proven he is on track with the Trump agenda, and who is more familiar than many with the leftist players on the ground in Washington, and the depth of and reasons for their disdain of the Trump agenda, is a brilliant, strategic, and (most importantly) offensive move.

Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Texas, C.D. 1) pointed out before this appointment was announced that choosing Congressman Meadows as his chief of staff would be one of the president's best avenues to root out disloyalty and undermining from within his own administration. Meadows knows D.C. and many of its consequential players.

Representative of the 11th District of North Carolina since 2013, Meadows knows the Congress, the Trump-supporters, and the swamp. He supports the president, fought for Trump's presidency against the assault of the American left in response to the Mueller investigation and the House impeachment proceedings, and will be a loyal voice and trustworthy whisperer into President Trump's ear.

Meadows is a brilliant choice for chief of staff because of that loyalty to the Trump agenda and an instinct to protect the president from the onslaught of the left and the Swamp. And he's a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, so he can directly provide articulate and succinct explanations of the roots of and reasons for conservative goals, unfiltered competing voices of holdovers less loyal to the values of the conservative base that elected Donald Trump.

The word "naïve" is rarely used in the same sentence as President Trump, but one of the blessings and the curses of Donald Trump's rise to the presidency is that he did not have a deep bench of political allies or a wide range of connections within the D.C. bubble from which to draw together a loyal administration team. Many of his hires flowed through the PPO, the Presidential Personnel Office, and were only as attuned to his agenda as were the gatekeepers manning that office. While President Trump ran on draining the swamp, entrenched Obama-era leftism resided in nooks and crannies of his White House, and the new president couldn't or wouldn't immediately drain the White House administration swamp, perhaps due to a naïveté about the breadth of the swamp compounded by the sheer overwhelming need to rapidly fill a wide range of positions.

Especially in the era of Trump in which America is changing course in profound ways, choosing Congressman Mark Meadows as chief of staff is a signal of commitment to the new direction America chose in the 2016 elections. From border abandonment to border security, from weakening the U.S. military to building it back up to needed strength, from the slow tumble over the cliff to socialism to the resurgence of freedom and free markets, from the capitulation to and participation in the globalist agenda to the rejection of globalism and the re-emergence of America as rooted in sovereignty based on our founding ideals, President Trump laid out a new direction for our country, and the voters said yes. The president needs leaders and players in place who are on board with the mission and committed to supporting it.

Choosing Meadows — who will expose and challenge the swamp-dwellers and offer wise counsel to the president — is another sign that this most unusual commander-in-chief is getting his "sea legs," growing into parts of the job he wasn't totally ready for, and putting in place leaders who embrace his agenda and mission.

Debbie Georgatos is the host of America, Can We Talk, an author, a public speaker, and a non-practicing attorney.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.