Tag: Trump demand for personal loyalty

Trump fires intelligence community watchdog who flagged Ukraine whistleblower complaint

The Hill logoPresident Trump has fired the inspector general for the intelligence community, saying he “no longer” has confidence in the key government watchdog.

Michael Atkinson, who had served as the intelligence community inspector general since May 2018, was the first to alert Congress last year of an “urgent” whistleblower complaint he obtained from an intelligence official regarding Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. His firing will take effect 30 days from Friday, the day Trump sent a notice informing Congress of Atkinson’s dismissal.

“This is to advise that I am exercising my power as President to remove from office the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, effective 30 days from today,” Trump wrote to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees in a letter obtained by The Hill. Continue reading.

Trump names Mark Meadows as new chief of staff

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Friday announced that Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) would replace Mick Mulvaney as his chief of staff, becoming the fourth person to hold the position during Trump’s tenure.

The president announced the news in a tweet, saying he would appoint Mulvaney as U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland.

“I am pleased to announce that Congressman Mark Meadows will become White House Chief of Staff. I have long known and worked with Mark, and the relationship is a very good one,” Trump tweeted Friday night while in Palm Beach, Fla., for fundraising events after a day of official travel. Continue reading.

An emboldened Trump says the quiet part out loud about why he fired Jeff Sessions

Washington Post logoWe all know why President Trump fired his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions: Trump blames him for allowing the Russia investigation to begin and thought Sessions should have intervened to end it.

But we haven’t heard Trump connect the dots so explicitly. Until Wednesday:

Trump is now publicly acknowledging something he spent years not quite saying: that he fired Sessions specifically because Sessions didn’t stop the inquiry by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The implication is that Sessions wasn’t loyal to Trump and what Trump wanted to happen in the Justice Department. Continue reading.

How Trump purged non-loyalists from federal government institutions and reshaped them in his own crude image

AlterNet logoPresident Ronald Reagan’s influence on the U.S. conservative movement greatly decreased in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president and ushered in a different type of right-wing politics that owed a lot to Patrick Buchanan and combined social conservatism with an emphasis on protectionism, isolationism and hyper-nationalism. The Atlantic’s George Packer, three years into Trump’s presidency, examines the ways in which Trump has reshaped the federal government and the White House — and not for the better.

Packer explains that when Trump was sworn into office in January 2017, many people in Washington, D.C. believed that he would be “outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited.” But it didn’t work out that way; instead, Trump refashioned government institutions in his own crude image, from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to the State Department.

“The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions,” Packer recalls. “They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it didn’t really matter as long as ‘the adults’ were there to wait out the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk. After three years, the adults have all left the room.” Continue reading.