The depth of the administration’s cynicism recalls the Big Daddy line from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “I detect the powerful odor of mendacity.” – Louis Dubose, co-author with Molly Ivins of Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America, speaking to the Austin Chronicle, 2003.
Don’t let these people near Washington, Molly Ivins warned when former Texas Gov. George W. Bush ran for president. They’ll do to the country what they did to Texas.
If she’d lived long enough to see the Trump administration, it would look eerily familiar. Only worse.
Another public official ousted for insufficient ideological purity under Acting President Donald Trump is fighting reassignment. Rick Bright this week lost his position as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. The head of an agency charged with overseeing research into a coronavirus vaccine found himself abruptly reassigned to the National Institutes of Health amidst a pandemic on track to kill more Americans in two months than died in the Vietnam War:
“I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit. I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way,” Dr. Rick Bright said Wednesday in a statement issued by his lawyers.
“Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the Administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit. While I am prepared to look at all options and to think ‘outside the box’ for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public,” Bright said in the statement, which was first reported by The New York Times.
In his daily briefing on Wednesday, Trump claimed, “I never heard of him.” But he’s heard of hydroxychloroquine. For weeks he’s been hyping the anti-malaria drug as a “game changer” in the fight against COVID-19. A small study released Tuesday found more deaths among those treated with hydroxychloroquine than among patients given standard treatments.
Doesn’t matter. Make Trump look bad and you’re gone. Even if you’re right. Ask Michael K. Atkinson, former intelligence community inspector general. Ask Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, the national security aide who testified under subpoena before the House. Or his twin brother. Or former ambassador Gordon D. Sondland. Or Capt. Brett Crozier, former commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Or James Comey or Andrew McCabe or Jeff Sessions or … you get the point.
The pattern recalls the 2007 Bush Department of Justice purge of federal prosecutors. A 2017 Brennan Center report summarized the scandal:
DOJ political leadership fired seven well-respected U.S. Attorneys, dismissing some top Republican prosecutors because they had refused to prosecute nonexistent voter fraud. Senior officials hired career staff members using a political loyalty test, perverted the work of the nonpartisan Voting Section toward partisan ends, and exerted pressure on states and an independent government agency to fall in line with an anti-voting rights agenda.
After a 22 -month investigation, the DOJ brought no criminal charges against former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or others involved.
A 2008 report by the DOJ Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility found that when hiring for the department’s Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program (the Monica Goodling scandal), the Bush DOJ exhibited “a pattern of deselecting candidates based on political or ideological affiliations.” Politico reported those programs “are used to funnel new law-school graduates into DOJ’s ranks.” In fact, they broke the law. There were resignations, but no charges filed.
Why bring those matters up again? This story on the Trump Office of Personnel Management stonewalling congressional Democrats trying to assess teleworking arrangements for federal employees:
Former officials and others have expressed concern in interviews that OPM’s new leadership favors sweeping changes to the federal workforce — in ways that would fundamentally change the nature of government service.
At the same time, other top officials are seeking to align the federal workforce more squarely with President Trump’s political agenda, rankling longtime civil servants. The drive has been spearheaded by John McEntee, the 29-year-old head of PPO and a fierce Trump loyalist.
OPM is currently headed up by acting director Mike Rigas, who assumed the role in mid-March after the abrupt resignation of Dale Cabaniss, who stepped down because of alleged poor treatment by several Trump appointees. Rigas has worked as the deputy director of OPM for the last two years and is also an alum of the Heritage Foundation.
Why, yes, there’s more (emphasis mine):
Rigas has told colleagues that he questions the constitutionality of the 1883 Pendleton Act, which codifies using merit to pick government officials, and believes that all executive branch employees should be political appointees, according to a person who has discussed the matter with him.
They want the executive branch fully politicized. Loyalists or nothing. Trump and Republican allies could soon have the conservative judges in place to allow it.
Ivins said of the Bush administration in 2003, “One of the fatal political mistakes they’re making is that classic political mistake when you only listen to the people on your side. That information group gets narrower and narrower and people convince themselves of things that simply aren’t true.”
What the Bushies attempted, Trump is trying again with less subtlety. He’s Trump-izing the federal government, taking the Trump Organization national in a way Karl Rove never dreamed. Ivins saw the possibility in 2003:
Austin Chronicle: What do you think is the relationship between Texas and national politics right now?
MI: We’re taking Texas national — it’s like that old [Terry Allen album] Lubbock (on Everything) ought be changed to Texas on Everything. They are Texas-izing the entire country; it’s amazing the other 49 haven’t seceded. There’s that old saying around the Capitol: “The purpose of government is to create a healthy business climate.” People really believe that here — and the result is we’re 49th in every indicator of people’s health and education and welfare and safety and all that other good stuff, and often we don’t even have a healthy business climate to show for it. I just think that “Let ‘er rip,” late-19th-century unregulated capitalism is back. As near as I can tell, that’s where Rove and the ideologues want to take the country. They want to completely undo the Great Society and the New Deal.
Ivins said of Pat Buchanan’s infamous 1992 Republican Convention speech that it “probably sounded better in the original German.” Trump’s 2016 convention speech might have killed her if the cancer hadn’t first. How I miss her.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.