It’s less of a problem that the Vindman brothers were marched out of the White House on Friday than that the National Security Council as a whole has been gutted and transformed into a shell of its former self. But the American people don’t generally know much or care a lot about what the NSC does. In any case, we should expect Trump to create an organization that reflects his values. If we don’t like it, our representatives can impeach him and remove him from office.
If it’s ironic that two military officers were escorted off the White House grounds rather than the president being escorted off the grounds by military officers, well, we have the Republicans in the Senate to thank for that. Since Trump got to stay, he gets to reassign people however he wants. He gets to fire Gordon Sondland as his ambassador to the European Union, too.
It’s a bit absurd for people to expect the president to continue employing people who testified that he committed impeachable offenses and then tried to cover them up. It doesn’t really matter that they told the truth while Trump lied, because Republican senators said that it was all permissible.
However you look at it, the purge at the National Security Council began a while ago.
Over the last six months, while impeachment dominated the news, [national security adviser, Robert] 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.
If this seems a little too reminiscent of something that happened in Iraq back in 1979, we should take it up with people like Senator Pat Toomey or Senator Marco Rubio.
[Saddam] Hussein hurriedly convened an assembly of party leaders on July 22. During the assembly, which he ordered videotaped, he claimed to have uncovered a fifth column within the party. Abdel-Hussein, broken after days of physical torture and under the threat of his family’s execution, confessed to taking a leading role in a Syrian-backed plot against the Iraqi government and gave the names of 68 alleged co-conspirators. These were removed from the room one by one as their names were called and taken into custody. After the list was read, Hussein congratulated those still seated in the room for their past and future loyalty. Those arrested at the meeting were subsequently tried together and found guilty of treason. Twenty-two men, including five members of the Revolutionary Command Council, were sentenced to execution. Those spared were given weapons and directed to execute their comrades.
In America, things move a little slower and with a bit less violence. But it amounts to the same thing– the consolidation of power.
In a pairing of tweets on Thursday night, former White House ethics czar Walter Schaub claimed the American public is about to see the worst of Donald Trump now that the Republican Party gave him a pass in a Senate impeachment trial.
According to Shaub, Trump will be spending every possible moment going after those he perceives as his enemies saying “We’re in the heads-on-pikes phase of burgeoning authoritarianism.”
There was a report during the impeachment trial that Republican senators had been warned that if they voted against the president, their heads would be on pikes. When House Manager Adam Schiff referenced that report in his remarks before the Senate, there was some feigned outrage:
Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a key moderate Republican who could be a crucial swing vote in the impeachment fight, broke her vow of silence on the floor.
“That’s not true,” Collins said several times from her seat, loudly enough to be overheard by reporters sitting in the upper level of the chamber.
But only one member took the risk and voted to convict Trump, and the response was immediate.
I think we all know what a tweet like that from Uday or Qusay Hussein would have meant in Saddam’s Iraq. Mitt Romney would have faced a firing squad comprised of his Republican colleagues in the Senate.
Things work a little differently in America, but they’re now basically the same.
For now. For now.
If Donald Trump loses in November, I fully expect him to do whatever is necessary to nullify the results. And I expect the Republican Party to go right along with that plan.
If you listen closely, that noise you hear is the death rattle of democracy in the United States of America.
The Republican senators, minus Mittens, did their best impression of apparatchiks. It worked with their base. For now. I wonder what else they will be forced to swallow to get Dear Leader’s support in the fall.
And, don’t those blue and purple state Republicans get that publicly embracing Dear Leader is a shiv in the back when it comes to the 60% of us who aren’t in the wingnut media bubble? Newspapers are excoriating them, and their protests of being independent ring hollow since we got to see just how they acted when it came time to uphold the constitutional principles they claim to love.
For those of us in safely blue states, donate to the Democratic candidate running against a vulnerable Republican. They need all the money and help they can get, with Russia and the usual lot of wingnut billionaires arrayed against them.
Predictably, Romney is told his physical safety cannot be assured at this year’s CPAC conference.