Just as soon as Donald Trump was officially acquitted in the hack job Senate impeachment trial, the president quickly got started on what we all knew was coming — revenge.
Idiots like GOP Senator Susan Collins excused their decision to vote in favor of Donald’s acquittal by claiming that Trump has “learned his lesson” as a result of this very public, very damning process. However, Collins — right along with the rest of the world — knew damn good and well that letting Trump off the hook would do nothing more than fan the flames of his already blazing ego.
And now here we are. Trump is waving around newspapers, holding celebration rallies at every opportunity, and White House employees who were brave enough to testify during his impeachment hearings are being escorted off the property at alarming rates.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman was fired from his position with the National Security Council yesterday evening and removed from the property as a direct result of Trump’s anger with him over his testimony.
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But NSC expert Dr. John Gans feels that there’s more to Trump’s oustings than the surface of retaliation — he feels that it’s a long-game scheme to cleanse the NSC of anyone who could ever blow the whistle on him again and ensure that it’s little more than a weak entity that will follow the direction of his every whim.
In a piece he penned for the New York Times Gans wrote, “The dismissal is just one part of a campaign by the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, to trumpify one of the most powerful and important institutions in government.
“Over the last six months, while impeachment dominated the news, Mr. O’Brien undertook the first restructuring of the council in a generation. He cut 60 to 70 positions, about a third of the staff, many of them career professionals. He also directed that the National Security Council focus less on transnational issues like global economics and nonproliferation, and more on bilateral and geographic priorities. In all, Mr. O’Brien’s trumpification of the staff will hamper the United States’ ability to meet the world’s challenges, and hamstring the next president.”
“Mr. Trump inherited from President Barack Obama the most powerful National Security Council in history,” Gans continued. “But the new president struggled to win over the hundreds of staff members who’d fought for the sorts of globalist policies — like trade deals and alliances — he had long opposed. Mr. Trump certainly tried to conquer the staff, naming a loyalist retired lieutenant general, Michael Flynn, as his first national security adviser and his nationalist adviser Steve Bannon to a high-level committee within it. The message was, as a Trump hire told one member of the staff, ‘The president doesn’t care about the things you care about, and the sooner that you know about it, the better.'”
Gan noted that it didn’t take long for Flynn and Bannon to be forced out, but that certainly wasn’t the end of it.
“The dysfunction at the council, which Mr. Flynn’s successors H.R. McMaster and John Bolton failed to end, helped break the government,” Gans wrote. “Congress’s impeachment hearings revealed the depth of the crisis: Mr. Trump used the staff and others to help shake Ukraine down for dirt on a political rival, while Colonel Vindman, the staff’s Ukraine point person, and the rest of the council pursued a different policy altogether. Far from becoming Mr. Trump’s warriors, staff members like Colonel Vindman became witnesses against the president, exposing the sordid breakdown to Congress.”
“At great risk to the country, Mr. Trump and Mr. O’Brien are finally winning the war at the council,” the NSC expert wrote in his conclusion. “But it’s the next president’s loss, and thus all of ours. Whoever replaces Mr. Trump will inherit a weaker and less worldly National Security Council, and learn the hard way it’s far easier to deconstruct a staff than rebuild one. As a result, even after Mr. Trump leaves the White House, Trumpism will continue to corrupt American foreign policy.”
You can read the full piece here.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
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