No doubt we will hear a lot about Trump as the ‘law and order’ candidate going forward. The irony and hypocrisy are almost laughable if it weren’t so serious. Just to remind everyone, Trump is an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in the same crimes for which his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to prison. Trump could not be indicted because of the DOJ policy stating that a sitting president cannot be indicted. And that’s just the start of a long list of actions for which Trump has been not been held accountable.
To further the irony, the phrase “law and order” was used as the title of a 1919 speech given by Calvin Coolidge in response to a police strike in Boston. Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts, had called in the National Guard [State Militia at that time] to quell a weekend of lawlessness when the department attempted to unionize. The Boston papers characterized the cops as Bolsheviks who set out to destroy civil society.
Definition: Autocrat – someone who insists on complete obedience from others; an imperious or domineering person
Trump should really call himself the ‘My Law and My Orders’ President. The turnover in the Whitehouse has been unprecedented in this administration and most often, the ‘sin’ of those fired or forced out is because they dared to disagree with Trump. The following are excerpts from an article by Dareh Gregorian for NBC News last September. (And there have been even more people ousted since then and if I were Mark Esper, the current Secretary of Defense, I’d be updating my resume!)
“The top echelon of the Trump administration has become a high-speed revolving door — with turnover in 78 percent of the positions, a new study has found.
And 31 percent of those White House “A-Team” jobs have turned over more than once, the study by the Brookings Institution shows.
“It’s historic, it’s unprecedented, it’s off the charts,” the study’s author, Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, told NBC News. “I’ve never seen this kind of turnover before.”
In just 32 months, President Donald Trump’s rate of change has surpassed “all of his predecessors who served four-year terms,” she said.PT. 10, 201902:13
The report focuses on the top 65 positions in the Executive Office of the President, which includes jobs like national security adviser, chief of staff, communications director, press secretary and director of national intelligence.
The study found 51 of the 65 positions have turned over since Trump took office.
Sixteen of those positions have turned over twice — or more, the study found.
[…]
Tenpas, who’s studied White House staffing since the 1990s, attributed the high rate of the change to “the president himself. In all of my studies, I’ve never seen a chief executive who fires staff more frequently and more publicly than President Trump.”
“It’s extraordinary,” she said.
The A-Team figures do not include Trump’s Cabinet, where there’s also been an unprecedented amount of tumult and turnover. Nine out of the 15 Cabinet positions that are in the presidential line of succession have turned over at least once, Tenpas found. That number surpasses the amount of change during entire first terms of Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and the one term of George H.W. Bush.
The elder Bush is the only president who came close to the amount of Cabinet turnover: eight, but that was over four years.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/charts-white-house-turnover-breaking-records-n1056101
When loyalty to Donald Trump is the primary qualification for keeping your job and there is absolutely no room to speak truth to power, that is a major problem and should concern everyone. If this had occurred under the previous administration, there would be outrage, calls for investigations and an unending cacophony from the Republicans about incompetence, failures of leadership, violating the Constitution and everything else. And yet now, the Republicans, by and large, just sit on their hands and watch, or worse yet, respond with ,”These people serve at the pleasure of the President. He has the authority make personnel changes as he sees fit.” Given the unprecedented turnover rate, you would think somebody might ask ‘why?’ I guess that is just a bridge too far. The silence is deafening and dangerous and allows Trump to continue to operate with complete impunity and unchecked.
Yesterday, several senior Trump administration officials stated that they don’t believe there is any systemic racism in police departments and the justice system. The data paint a completely different picture. Yet another indicator of just how out of touch Trump and his minions are with reality. I intend to tackle that tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy your stay in ‘Trumpland’ – where facts don’t matter and reality is whatever King Trump says it is!!
So true. Let’s hope politicians in the Republican Party wake up from their amnesia of what they know what the Constitution says.