Tag: trump derangement syndrome

The left is screaming that all these are acts of vengeance. But that is not what is happening at all. Donald Trump is restoring some health and sanity to the American government, and every American owes him a debt of gratitude.

Though few noticed or realized the full implications of what was happening, the nation has passed through an extremely dangerous period. When Old Joe Biden and his henchmen decided to wage lawfare against Trump, they corrupted the justice system and endangered the very idea of a loyal opposition that the majority allowed to operate freely in an atmosphere of mutual respect. 

Combine the Biden regime’s lawfare with its efforts to silence dissidents on social media, and Old Joe and the people who were running him were setting us on the path to a one-party state in which only one political perspective would be allowed to be heard. 

Now Trump is striking back against all that. The New York Post reported Saturday that Trump “has ordered security clearances stripped from a new hit list of antagonists.” This makes it sound as if Trump’s acts are strictly personal, and there certainly is a personal aspect to them, as everyone whose security clearance Trump revoked was in on the effort to frame and destroy him. But this goes far, far beyond matters of personal pique.

First, there was the security clearance of Old Joe Biden himself, because, Trump quite rightly noted, “I don’t trust him.” Now Trump has also revoked the security clearance of one of Old Joe’s primary hatchet men, former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who, according to the Post, “orchestrated the ‘Dirty 51’ letter from former intelligence officials on the eve of the 2020 election.”

That letter assured the world that Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contained clear evidence of the Biden crime family’s influence peddling as well as of Hunter’s out-of-control debauchery, was Russian disinformation. The objective was to take the laptop away from Trump as a campaign issue, and it worked: during one of his debates with the president, Old Joe invoked the assessment of the “intelligence professionals” to defuse the story. “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant,” Biden said, lying through his teeth. “Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.” 

If Blinken engineered that hoax, he has the ethics of a junkyard dog, or makes a junkyard dog look upstanding, and so he should be as far away from classified information as possible. “Bad guy. Take away his passes,” Trump said, adding that “this is to take away every right they have [revoking security clearances] including they can’t go into [federal] buildings.” Bravo. And there was more.

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When President Donald Trump fired 17 inspectors general at the end of his first week in office, he exercised executive power that the Constitution vests in him alone. His opponents squawked predictably, and legal challenges to the firings are inevitable, but the Trump administration no doubt welcomes those challenges. It should, because they are challenges the president is likely to win, and for the sake of our republic, it is essential that he does.

Inspectors general, like so many other well-intentioned but bad ideas, originated in the Carter administration. The idea sounded good enough: stop government mismanagement and waste by creating an inspector general in each of 12 major agencies, charged with ferreting out government fraud and abuse. The inspectors general would be appointed by the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate, and they would have the authority to operate independently from their agency heads while reporting legal violations directly to the attorney general. 

The first problem, however, is that the inspectors general did not turn out to be very good at accomplishing their intended purpose. The so-called “watchdogs” of the federal government missed everything from the National Security Agency’s unlawful bulk domestic phone records collection program to Operation Fast and Furious’ illegal arms sales to Mexican cartels. Yet despite having too little to show for their efforts, the sounds-good idea of an inspector general proved irresistible, and over time, inspectors general proliferated throughout the federal government. In 2008, Congress even created a new agency just to coordinate the IGs (who numbered more than 70 by that time). 

The second problem is that in 2022 Congress tried to enforce the “independence” of the inspectors general by making them independent from the president himself — and there, the Constitution draws the line. Congress purported to require the president to provide notice to Congress 30 days before firing an inspector general and to provide “the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for the firing in the notice. President Trump did not do this, but that is because he did not have to.

Requiring notice and a rationale — which is essentially a requirement that the firing be for some cause — goes beyond Congress’s power under the Constitution, and so President Trump could not actually be required to do it.

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