It’s amazing how many great heroes there were in the Trump administration who Kept Us Safe. Remember Anonymous who assured us that, really, the grown-ups were in charge? And of course, there’s that great, amazing hero General Milley who took it upon himself to ensure Trump didn’t nuke the planet. This time it’s Pat Cipollone:
On the other side during that meeting on the evening of Jan. 3 were the top leaders of the Justice Department, who warned Mr. Trump that they and other senior officials would resign en masse if he followed through. They received immediate support from another key participant: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. According to others at the meeting, Mr. Cipollone indicated that he and his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would also step down if Mr. Trump acted on his plan.
Such a hero. But I have a question:
If he was such a hero, what the fuck was Cipollone doing there in the first place?
A real hero would never have agreed to work in the Trump administration. A real hero, if s/he was somehow blind to Trumpism before then, would have left loooooong before January 3.
Please remember this as the number of self-proclaimed Great Heroes Who Stood Up to Trump and Saved the Republic continues to proliferate in the coming years:
The real heroes were those who resigned in January, 2017, or delayed government service until Trump was gone. The guys who stayed and are now claiming they “made a difference?” They’re not heroes. They’re just Sloppy Joes.
Adding: To those who say I should be grateful to Anonymous, Milley, and many others for standing in Trump’s way: Masha Gessen and others have made the point that you can’t really mitigate the harm an autocrat inflicts. It just prolongs the authoritarian regime. No one in the government can effectively prevent the harm Putin causes, and no one could really blunt Trump’s harm either (for example, see Jan 6). The truly principled competent people let autocrats fail, and they hasten their fall by refusing to work for them in the first place, not by threatening to resign when things, as they inevitably will, spiral downwards.. By that time, it is far too late to stop the madness and horrors (for example, see Jan 6).