Oversight, His ass!
Donald Trump, twice-impeached convicted felon and career huckster, spent the first week of his second term exacting revenge against current and former officials who as much as contradicted his frequent misstatements. He cancelled the federal security details for Dr. Anthony Fauci, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook (The Hill):
Fauci led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for almost 40 years, including at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bolton was Trump’s national security adviser, and Pompeo was Trump’s secretary of State. Hook was a key Pompeo aide.
All four men have fallen out of favor with Trump, with Bolton in particular now a strident critic of the president.
Fauci has long been the target of threats from anti-vaccine extremists. Iran has targeted Bolton for his role 2020 drone killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.
Friday night, Trump fired 17 federal inspectors general, internal watchdogs for multiple government agencies, including the Departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Energy, reports The Washington Post. Trump’s action is an apparent violation of a federal law requiring that the president give Congress 30 days’ notice of firing a Senate-confirmed inspector general:
Most of those dismissed were Trump appointees from his first term, which stunned the watchdog community. One prominent inspector general survived the purge — Michael Horowitz at the Justice Department, an appointee of President Barack Obama who has issued reports critical of both the Biden administration and Trump’s first administration.
“It’s a widespread massacre,” said one of the fired inspectors general. “Whoever Trump puts in now will be viewed as loyalists, and that undermines the entire system.”
You see, Trump fires his own men. In his first term, Trump hired “the best people” and subsequently fired dozens of them, and did again Friday night (New York Times):
The firings threatened to upend the traditional independence of the internal watchdogs, and critics of Mr. Trump reacted with alarm.
“Inspectors general are charged with rooting out government waste, fraud, abuse and preventing misconduct,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “President Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”
Trump is in the process of sweeping away the last remnants of the Old Republic, to borrow from a cultural touchstone.
In firing his own men, Trump sends a clear signal that he will tolerate no insubordination. There will be no oversight, no rules unbroken, no limits in his second term. Trump always wanted to be emperor and, as far as he’s concerned, he is one now. He has all but subjugated his entire political party and reduced its “leaders” to fawning courtiers. (But that’s another post.)
Meantime, Democrats in the minority struggle to find any way to restrain Trump’s worst instincts, unwilling or unable as many senior Democrats in Congress are, to face the fact that they are bringing 20th-century knives to a 21st-century gun fight. The Washington they knew was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.