Column: Make America safe again? Not like this
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At the windup of his MAGA rallies, Donald Trump liked to mix it up when he got to his crowd-pleasing promise to “Make America Great Again.” He’d shout fill-in-the-blank variations as he built to the finale. A favorite: “Make America safe again!”
Promise broken.
Mere weeks into his comeback presidency, Trump’s myriad moves are making Americans less safe at home and abroad. (Grocery prices aren’t lower, either, but that’s a broken-promise column for another day.)
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Consider this self-inflicted security peril for starters: At the Justice Department and the FBI, Trump toadies are executing his vendetta for his past legal woes by firing, demoting or reassigning hundreds and potentially thousands of career employees nationwide who, all told, have centuries’ worth of experience in domestic and foreign extremism. And yet former FBI Director Christopher Wray, who resigned rather than be fired, repeatedly warned that extremists are a top threat.
Fuhgedaboutit: The supine Republican-run Senate is expected soon to confirm Kash Patel as Wray’s successor, a Trump loyalist who sees the president’s political enemies as the real danger. Republican senators are falling in line even though Patel arguably lied to them, under oath, during his confirmation hearing. Even as the purge was underway of agents assigned to the now-erased Jan. 6 and classified documents cases against Trump, Patel was testifying that no FBI employees “will be terminated for case assignments.”
The opening moves of Trump’s second presidency are an exaggeratedly steroidal replay of a familiar dynamic. But this chapter will end.
I was reminded of the scene in “The Godfather” juxtaposing Michael Corleone in church for his nephew’s baptism, mouthing the ritual responses over the babe while his mafiosi fanned out across New York City to execute his rivals.
Similarly, Patel’s soon-to-be superior, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, was no sooner confirmed last week than she created a “weaponization working group” at the Justice Department to prosecute the prosecutors and investigate the investigators on the Trump cases. As the FBI agents’ association objected, using Trump’s own words, the purges are “dangerous distractions” from the work “to make America safe again.” Nice.
FBI agents who used to monitor terrorist suspects reportedly are being reassigned either to Bondi’s — make that Trump’s — retribution squad or to helping the Department of Homeland Security deport migrants. Personally, I’d rather the government keep eyes on militia groups, lone wolf extremists, child traffickers and some of the vengeful Jan. 6 convicts that Trump pardoned (one of whom was also found guilty of plotting to assassinate FBI agents) than have the feds spend a minute rousting migrants from meat-packing plants, construction companies and homes.
How do constitutional democracies die? The Trump administration is following a well-worn pathway toward autocracy
Heed lifelong Republican William H. Webster, the only person to serve as both FBI and CIA director and, post-9/11, chair of a homeland security advisory council to Presidents George W. Bush, Obama and Trump. Still on fire at 100, Webster last week admonished Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Charles E. Grassley of Iowa to help kill Patel’s nomination in the committee.
“This administration is intent on destroying the FBI and eschewing the rule of law,” Webster said in the letter, which I was given. “I urge you,” he added, “to consider the risks to national security, the integrity of the Bureau, and the safety of the American people [emphasis mine] before allowing this nomination to proceed unchecked.”
Complicity in the FBI’s destruction “would not be a legacy I would want,” Webster pointedly told Grassley. But apparently the 91-year-old Grassley is fine with it. He announced his committee would vote on Patel perhaps later this week.
With firings and lax enforcement, Trump moving to dismantle government’s public integrity guardrails
President Trump once felt hemmed in by watchdogs, lawyers and judges tasked with affirming good government and fair play. Now, he seems determined to break those constraints.
Here’s another new threat to Americans’ security: Thanks to Trump’s unelected and unvetted co-president — Elon Musk, world’s richest man and a top U.S. corporate-welfare recipient — packs of young and unvetted Musk-rats have been invading federal agencies and IT systems. They’re gaining access to the personal and tax data of millions of Americans, including recipients of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, federal contracts and student loans.
Much the same purging and disruption is going on at the CIA and other intelligence agencies that protect Americans from dangers abroad. CIA operatives have been identified in unclassified emails, putting “a direct target on their backs for China,” said Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Being pushed out the doors are officers fluent in Arabic, Russian, Chinese and more, a cohort with essential skills that took agencies years to build.
Meanwhile, on track for confirmation as director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard — a former congresswoman who, like Trump, has previously rejected U.S. intel in favor of Kremlin talking points — will be responsible for the daily briefing that goes to the president. What could go wrong?
Officials and federal officers have turned away scores of U.S. Agency for International Development staffers who showed up for work at its Washington headquarters.
And of course there’s Trump’s self-own: the decimation of the U.S. Agency for International Development. For six decades, that humanitarian office under the State Department has enjoyed bipartisan support for its “soft power” contribution to America’s global security and goodwill. Through its relationships in 100 countries, including trouble spots, USAID also has been an early warning system for overseas risks.
As retired Marine Gen. James N. Mattis famously warned Congress in 2013: “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately.” He reiterated that message years later as Trump’s unhappy first Defense secretary — just more good advice that Trump rejects, at our peril. Same with Mattis’ pitch for maintaining U.S. alliances: “In history, nations with allies thrive, nations without them die.”
Trump has alienated allies including Canada, Mexico, Denmark and Panama with his imperialist taunts. Yet nothing has so inflamed the world, and especially the Mideast tinderbox, as his call to take Gaza, expel 2.2 million Palestinians and build a “Riviera.” Trump’s own DHS “sent a chilling message” to police nationwide after the president’s remarks, warning them to be on alert for retaliatory acts, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported.
We should all feel the chill. Make America safe again? Not like this.
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