My plan is to do another Post 2024 Election Freak-Out Update today, but this chapter deserves its own post.
Last night while watching the DirecTV news mix, which allows me to sample CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and BBC America simultaneously, I was puzzled to see Rachel Maddow, snearing and mugging as usual, featuring old Watergate headlines about the “Saturday Night Massacre,” when President Nixon ordered a succession of Attorneys General to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who, the assumption went, was getting too close to uncovering Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up.
“What does that have to do with the price of beans?” I asked myself. I clicked on Rachel, which I usually won’t do unless there is a loaded pistol aimed at my head. Of course! Interim D.C. U.S. attorney Edward R. Martin, Jr. had dismissed about 30 federal prosecutors who worked on the January 6, 2021 cases over the past four years. The prosecutors who had worked on Jack Smith’s lawfare prosecutions of Trump for the mishandling of classified material at Mar-A-Largo and his alleged attempt to steal (back) the 2024 election have already been pink-slipped or soon will be. Rachel, repeating the agreed-upon Axis talking point, was saying that this is Trump emulating Nixon, preventing “justice” and hobbling law enforcement. CNN got around to the same narrative a bit later.
Indeed, all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye. President Trump would have been incompetent, foolish and naive not to fire all of these lawyers. Maybe some of them were ethical and capable of independent thought (as their ethics rules require), but there is no way to figure out which. Most of them have been poisoned by the “Deep State “Get Trump!” culture seeded bt Obama, Hillary Clinton, and others. As with the FBI and intelligence personnel who are losing their ability to sabotage this President in his second term as they did in his first, those lawyers heading out the door cannot be trusted. It would make no more sense to allow them to undermine President Trump with leaks and worse than it would have made sense to keep Jack Smith around; luckily, he had the sense to resign.
The Axis media reacted similarly to Maddow’s freak-out when Trump revoked the security clearances of the fifty former intelligence officials who lied in a signed letter to ensure that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, as they abused their positions and expertise to claim, falsely, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was really a “Russian disinformation” scheme. NBC compared Trump’s move to past incidents of removing security clearances for gays. Typical. How could President Trump trust the security of the nation or the functioning of his Presidency to partisan liars who used their “Deep State” powers to undermine the then-sitting President? He couldn’t. Yet this and similar essential moves to protect his Presidency, its agenda and the will of the electorate are being framed as “vengeance” and “retribution.”
They are, rather, competent leadership, common sense, and a fine example of learning from past mistakes. The totalitarian-trending Left thought that it could insulate its operatives from the just consequences of their unethical conduct by protecting them from prosecution. That was pure projection, which Democrats have excelled at in recent years. Trump doesn’t have to lock up these termites in the woodwork of the government, just ensure that they can’t do any more harm.
This morning on PBS, Christine Amanpour actually resorted to the “democratic norms” Big Lie again. Wow. Trump’s leaning curve is a lot steeper than his opponents’.
Two things have occurred to me as I watch the Trump Presidency unfolding and read the apocalyptic analysis by most of the news media and my sad, Trump-Deranged friends. The first is that Donald Trump is already a transformational President, much as that statement will make my friends’ heads explode.
The other is that genuine reform often feels like cruelty to those being reformed.
Ethics Alarms 
Yep, I’m sure Civil Service reform back in the late 19th century felt especially cruel to the illiterate incompetents who only got their jobs by virtue of campaigning for the winners.
Which makes them different from their ‘Civil Service’ successors of the past few decades how?
Who has had the most votes has changed from time to time, but the civil service has continued to expand; in power, in personnel, in budget.
My new fave phrase! “Genuine reform often feels like cruelty to those being reformed.”
I’m saving that one for those opposing fixing the broken immigration system.
The difference between Biden and Trump?
Biden would have prosecuted those folks for something or other.
Trump fires them, and they can go on about their business.
This is one big reason Trump is sitting in the White House now and not Harris.
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Oh, and if I’m wrong about what Trump does? I’ll be really pissed at Trump and so will a lot of GOP voters. The lawfare for lawfare’s sake has to stop, which I think is what Bondi and Patel have said in their hearings.
Remember when Bill Clinton prosecuted the White House Travel Office employees for embezzlement so that he could put his buddies in their place? They were tied up in federal court for almost a decade, bankrupted from legal fees, with a business destroyed by the bad press. When they finally got their day in court, their attorney asked the government how much money was missing. The response? None.
Now about DOGE. They are reporting that once they got access to the Treasury’s system, they found that all invoices were paid. The employees were told not to question invoices, just pay them. It doesn’t matter if the invoice comes from Hamas or ISIS, just pay it. No invoice that was submitted to the Treasury for over a decade has been examined to see if it is legitimate. Do you think this was kept secret? Do you think the Treasury employees didn’t tell their relatives and friends? I could have submitted an invoice for $50,000 to the Treasury for ‘consulting fees’ and they would have paid it. If I wanted to be on better legal grounds, I could have sent a printer and some toner to a government agency and, if the didn’t return it, submit an invoice for $100,000.
Over $6 trillion/year in invoices and they are all just paid without examination. It is looking like our entire government is just a money laundering operation.
Trump should appeal the stay on his freeze on grants, etc. He needs to show this as evidence that vast amounts of money are being lost to fraud and he needs time to find out what is legitimate and not. I would shame the judge who stayed that order. When Biden became President, he cancelled all contracts for a major pipeline. Those were legal obligations that he reneged on and that was fine. Why is postponing a payment ‘unconstitutional and illegal’?
On a related note.
https://x.com/GeorgePapa19/status/1885800253414158601