Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Throughout
Donald Trump’s Presidency, he has demanded one thing and one thing only from
his appointees, from the most prestigious Cabinet positions to the lowliest
drones on the White House staff. He calls it “loyalty,” and by that he means
not loyalty to the United States Constitution, the principle of representative
democracy, the pursuit of justice or even the most basic competence in their
jobs. He means “loyalty” to the person of Donald Trump. Appointees in Trump’s
administration are expected to serve Trump,
not the country. As long as they do what Trump wants and make him look good, he
loves them. Once they step off the reservation, he not only fires them but
publicly insults them and does whatever he can to destroy their chances at a
subsequent career.
Adolf Hitler had
a name for this: Gleichschaltung. Like
Trump, Hitler was determined to rid his government of its infrastructure of
nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with fanatical, dedicated Nazis who
would be loyal, not to the German Constitution or the German people as a whole,
but personally to him.
Gleichschaltung is one of those indigestible compound words the
Germans like to pull together from bits and pieces of their language. It
doesn’t have an easy English translation — though I’ve seen it rendered as
“coordination” or “rectification” — but Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Gleichschaltung)
gives the following definition:
[T]he act,
process, or policy of achieving rigid and total coordination and uniformity (as
in politics, culture, communication) by forcibly repressing or eliminating
independence and freedom of thought, action, or expression: forced
reduction to a common level: forced standardization or assimilation.
Trump’s latest
act of Gleichschaltung occurred on
Saturday, June 20, when at the request of Attorney General William Barr he
fired the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman.
Berman had first learned the administration wanted him out the day before, when
Barr’s office had issued a press release stating that Berman would be resigning
and Jay Clayton, Trump’s appointee to head the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC), would be taking his place as U.S. Attorney. According to one
report, the initial motivation was simply that Clayton —a long-time friend of
Trump who had supported him in the 2016 campaign — was tired of living and
working in Washington, D.C. and wanted a job that would return him to New York.
If Trump and
Barr thought Berman would meekly accept his dismissal and go gently into that
good night filled with appointees Trump has got rid of for specious reasons and
in devious ways, they had another think coming. “I have not resigned, and have
no intention of resigning, my position, to which I was appointed by the Judges
of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York,”
Berman said in a statement. “I will step down when a presidentially appointed
nominee is confirmed by the Senate. Until then, our investigations will move
forward without delay or interruption. I cherish every day that I work with the
men and women of this Office to pursue justice without fear or favor — and
intend to ensure that this Office’s important cases continue unimpeded.”
Ironically, when
Berman was first appointed in early 2018, there were concerns raised that he
was too close to Trump. He had worked on Trump’s transition team and had
personally been interviewed by Trump for the job — a breach of the usual
protocol that the Attorney General interviews U.S. Attorney candidates and the
President merely says yea or nay on their appointments. He had also been a law
partner of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani (a former Mayor of New
York who had, ironically, once himself been the U.S Attorney for the Southern
District of New York) at the firm of Greenberg, Traurig, LLP, though they had
never actually tried a case together.
But if Trump
thought he would be getting a complaisant U.S. Attorney who would treat him and
his friends with kid gloves, he was sorely disappointed. Under Berman, the
Southern District — which, because its jurisdiction includes Manhattan, has
authority over virtually all of Trump’s business dealings — investigated and
won a guilty plea from Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen. Though Berman
didn’t participate in that case, his office not only got Cohen to plead guilty
to eight felonies, his plea stated that he committed at least two of the crimes
because his then-boss, Donald Trump, ordered him to.
Berman’s office
also investigated whether Donald Trump’s main business, the Trump Organization,
violated campaign finance laws. And he launched an investigation of his former
law partner, Rudolph Giuliani, on charges that he and two associates, Lev
Parnas and Igor Fruman, had broken U.S. laws by attempting to get the
government of Ukraine to dig up damaging information on Democratic Presidential
candidate Joe Biden. He also investigated the U.S. operations of Halkbank, a
Turkish bank with ties to Turkey’s authoritarian President, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, a favorite of Trump’s.
In March 2020
Berman said publicly, “The Southern District of New
York has a long history of integrity and pursuing cases, and declining to
pursue cases, based only on the facts and the law and the equities, without
regard to partisan political concerns.” That, one might think, is what a U.S.
attorney is supposed to do. But it’s not what Trump thinks a U.S. attorney is supposed to do. In a remarkable
interview with Right-wing talk radio host Larry O’Connor on WMAL-FM November 2,
2017 Trump said:
[T]he saddest thing is, because I’m the President of
the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice
Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to
be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated
by it. … [A]s a President, you are not supposed to be involved in that process.
But hopefully they are doing something, and at some point maybe we’re going to
all have it out.
Trump made clear
to O’Connor just what he would “love” to
be able to order the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate, including
the funding of Christopher Steele’s dossier on the connections between Trump
and Russia (which he falsely claimed was the origin of Robert Mueller’s two-year
investigation of Russian influence on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 Presidential
campaign); Hillary Clinton’s e-mails; and the leaks from his own
administration. It’s clear that Trump believes the Justice Department should be
his personal instrument of vengeance against his perceived political enemies
—including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, whom he’s recently accused of “crimes”
without giving any specifics about what crimes he’s accusing them of.
And in Bill
Barr, he now has an attorney general who for the most part will go along,
investigate whomever Trump wants investigated and clear whomever Trump wants
cleared — including Trump’s first national security adviser, General Michael
Flynn, whom Barr recently dismissed Mueller’s case against even though Flynn
had twice pleased guilty to lying to the
FBI. On June 20, Barr quickly quashed Geoffrey Berman’s brief rebellion,
announcing that he had asked Trump to fire Berman and Trump had done so. Berman
agreed to leave the office once Barr assured him that instead of Jay Clayton,
his interim replacement would be his deputy, Audrey Strauss, whom Berman
apparently trusted to maintain the integrity of his investigations against
Trump’s associates.
A June 20 report
in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/nyregion/trump-geoffrey-berman-fired-sdny.html?auth=login-email&login=email),
which was so extensive no fewer than seven people were on the byline — Alan
Feuer, Katie Benner, Ben Protess, Maggie Haberman, William K. Rashbaum, Nicole
Hong and Benjamin Weiser — noted that, “Throughout the day on Saturday, many
current and former employees of the Southern District marveled at just how sour
relations with their colleagues in Washington had gotten. Some worried openly
that the move threatened the independence of federal prosecutors.”
The Times team quoted David Massey, who’s now a defense
attorney but served as a prosecutor with the Southern District of New York for
over a decade, as saying, “While there have always been turf battles between
the Southern District and the Justice Department in Washington, and
occasionally sharp elbows, to take someone out suddenly while they’re investigating
the president’s lawyer, it is just unprecedented in modern times.”
Voice of America or
Voice of Trump?
Three days
before Geoffrey Berman left his job as U.S. Attorney for the Southern Disrict
of New York, an aggressive appointee of President Trump carried out a Trump Gleichschaltung at the Voice of America (VOA) and its parent agency,
the U.S. Agency for Global Media. The appointee was Michael Pack, Right-wing
filmmaker and protégé of former Trump campaign manager and strategic adviser
Steve Bannon.
Pack took office
June 4 after a contentious confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate and a
party-line 53-38 vote to approve him, and he immediately fired Ray Fang, head
of Radio Free Asia, and Alberto Fernandez, head of the Middle East Information
Network. He also fired the agency’s entire board of directors and announced he
would appoint a new board. Voice of America director Amanda Bennett and her
deputy, Sandy Sugawara, both resigned in protest.
The Voice of
America was founded in 1942 as part of the U.S. war effort. Its initial mission
was to counteract Nazi propaganda being broadcast to neutral countries. After
World War II ended and the Cold War began, its mission evolved to counter
propaganda from the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries, and to
promote representative democracy and free-market capitalism as superior
alternatives to Communism. But VOA has long been caught up in an ongoing battle
over how best to promote the United States: should it broadcast programming
reflecting the views of the United States government and whoever is currently
running it; or should it promote the idea of a free press by serving as an
example of one, beholden only to accuracy, fairness, independence and other
journalistic standards?
The current law,
as summarized on the Voice of America Web site, “prohibits interference by any
U.S. government official in the objective, independent reporting of news,
thereby safeguarding the ability of our journalists to develop content that
reflects the highest professional standards of journalism, free of political
interference,”
Right-wingers in
the U.S. government have been dumping on the Voice of America at least since
1953, when the notorious Red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) sent
two of his staff members to Europe to investigate it. One of the investigators
was Roy Cohn, who later became a New York attorney and fixer until he was
disbarred for ethics violations in 1986 and died of complications from AIDS a
year later. One of Roy Cohn’s principal clients was Donald Trump; Cohn
masterminded Trump’s rise from small-time real-estate developer in New York’s
outer boroughs to major player in Manhattan, and he made such an impression on
Trump that quite often, faced with legal troubles, he will yell at his current
attorneys and say, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
The Voice of
America again attracted scrutiny from Right-wing Congressmembers in 2014. That
year, according to a New Republic report
quoted in a recent post on Vox.com (https://www.vox.com/2020/6/18/21295549/trump-bannon-pack-global-media-china-wednesday-massacre),
“In 2014, Rep. Ed Royce, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, introduced
legislation that would turn the agency into an explicit
instrument of American ‘public diplomacy,’ with a mandate to promote U.S.
foreign policy.”
According to
Vox.com reporter Alex Ward, Right-wing attacks on Voice of America ramped up
once Trump declared his candidacy for President. A group called “BBG Watch”
(“BBG” stood for “Broadcasting Board of Governors,” then the name of the board
running the U.S. Agency for Global Media) “highlighted news reports in which
the agency compared Trump to Lenin and Mao, criticized his immigration
policies, and poked fun at his speeches,” the New Republic
reported in 2017.
Once Trump won
the election, Ward explained, “Republicans in Congress changed the governance
structure of VOA, replacing the bipartisan executive board with a
CEO appointed by the president. And two young members of the administration in
January 2017 were sent over to the news organization to monitor its operations.
‘The priority is to make coverage fall in line with the president’s world view,’
said Brett Bruen, the director for global engagement on President Barack
Obama’s National Security Council, who had these U.S.-funded media outlets in
his portfolio.”
According to
Ward, the main complaint Trump, Congressional Republicans and Right-wing media
activists have against VOA is it’s been too soft on China. (This is also the
stated reason Trump gave for pulling U.S. support from the World Health
Organization —first “temporarily,” then permanently — in the middle of the
SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.) “Journalists should report the facts, but VOA has instead
amplified Beijing’s propaganda,” read an April 2020 White House
article titled “Amid a Pandemic, Voice of America Spends Your
Money to Promote Foreign Propaganda.”
“This week, VOA
called China’s Wuhan lockdown a successful ‘model’ copied by much of the world
— and then tweeted out video of the Communist government’s celebratory light
show marking the quarantine’s alleged end,” the article continued. Iromically,
VOA did not create that news story — the Associated Press did — but Trump
nonetheless cited it in defense of Pack’s purge: “What things they say are
disgusting toward our country. And Michael Pack would get in and do a great
job.”
Senator Robert
Menendez (D-New Jersey), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations
Committee, said, “As feared, Michael Pack has confirmed he is on a political
mission to destroy the [agency’s] independence and undermine its historic role.
The wholesale firing of the Agency’s network heads, and disbanding of corporate
boards to install President Trump’s political allies is an egregious breach of
this organization’s history and mission from which it may never recover.”
“[Pack] has
taken a rocket-propelled grenade and started shooting it off at various parts
of the organizational chart,” said Bruen, and he’s turning into “something much
more similar to the North Korean Ministry of Information.” Any perceived
campaign to disseminate Trump’s world view “will stink up the place,” he
continued, “and that stench is going to spread to anything that carries the
label of a U.S. international media agency.”
Though
acknowledging that VOA and its sister networks need improvement — especially
since countries like Russia and China are making their international media outreach agencies more efficient
— Bruen added that VOA and the other U.S. Agencyfor Global Media Networks have
for almost 80 years been able “to develop an audience and credible independent
voice so people would listen to the information that the U.S. wanted to share.”
But
it’s clear that Trump, Bannon and Pack don’t think an independent news source
with the U.S. government imprimatur is a
good thing. Prominent Trump critic Walter Shaub, who was pushed out of his
former position as director of government ethics in yet another example of
Trump’s Gleichschaltung, called
Pack’s purge “the Breitbartization of U.S. government media” — a reference to
Breitbart News, the far-Right Web site Bannon used to run before he joined
Trump’s campaign and returned to when Trump fired him in August 2017 — only to
be fired at the behest of Breitbart’s financial sponsors in January 2018.
And it’s ironic,
to say the least, that the issue on which Trump and his cronies have savaged
the Voice of America is its alleged “softness” on China, when former National
Security Advisor John Bolton revealed in his book The Room Where It Happened that Trump sucked up to Chinese President Xi Jinping
at an international meeting in Osaka, Japan in summer 2019 to get him to buy
more soybeans from American farmers to help Trump’s re-election chances in the
farm states.
Though Bolton
was prevented by White House censors from putting Trump’s exact words in the
book on the ground that they were “classified,” Gabriel Sherman of Vanity
Fair got a look at an unredacted copy of
the manuscript (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/boltons-unredacted-book-shows-trump-trying-to-hide).
He reported that Trump told Xi, “Buy a lot of soybeans and wheat and make sure
we win.”
Trump’s
War on Inspectors General
President Trump
began his jihad against the federal
government’s inspectors general on April 3, when he fired Michael Atkinson, the
intelligence community’s inspector general (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287).
Inspectors general (that’s the correct plural, by the way) are supposed to be
independent of the agencies to which they’re assigned. Their purpose is to keep
an eye on federal agencies and report wrongdoing by the executive branch to
Congress. One of the ways they do that is by receiving complaints from agency
whistleblowers, deciding whether the whistleblowers’ allegations are serious
and credible, and if they are, transmitting them to Congress.
Atkinson did
just that in September 2019, passing along a report by a whistleblower who
alleged he’d heard of a phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian
President Volodomyr Zelensky in which Trump told Zelensky, “I would like you to
do me a favor, though,” before Trump would release military aid money Congress
had approved for Ukraine’s self-defense against Russian aggression.
It was actually
two favors: Trump wanted Ukraine’s justice department to investigate former
vice-president Joe Biden, Trump’s likely re-election opponent in November, and
his son Hunter over Hunter’s service on the board of a Ukrainian energy
company. He also wanted Ukraine to turn over Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server —
even though the allegation that Ukraine had the server at all was a bit of
Right-wing conspiracy-mongering.
Since the
whistleblower’s complaint and Atkinson’s forwarding it to Congress led to
Trump’s impeachment in the House of Representatives and trial in the Senate —
both times on virtually party-line votes — Trump evidently wanted payback
against Atkinson even though Trump himself had appointed him in November 2017.
Trump fired Atkinson on a Friday night and said, “As is the case with regard to
other positions where I, as president, have the power of appointment, by and
with the advice and consent of the Senate, it is vital that I have the fullest
confidence in the appointees serving as inspectors general. That is no longer
the case with regard to this inspector general.” Later he said Atkinson “took a fake report and gave it to Congress.”
Since then Trump
has fired at least three other inspectors general (https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/16/politics/list-inspector-general-removed-trump/index.html).
On April 10 he removed acting Defense Department inspector general Glenn Fine
from his job, which among other things would have given him authority to
oversee the spending of the $10 trillion Congress had just approved in
emergency relief funding in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Trump actually
demoted Fine rather than firing him, but within a month Fine chose to resign
completely rather than accept a lesser assignment.
On May 2, Trump
announced he would be firing Christi Grimm, acting inspector general for the
Department of Health and Human Services, after she signed a report that said
America’s doctors and other health care workers can’t get enough SARS-CoV-2
tests and personal protective equipment to do their jobs properly. Trump had
denounced the report as “wrong” on April 6 and claimed Grimm was an appointee
of former President Barack Obama, though she’d previously served in government
under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Then Trump fired
Steve Linick, the State Department’s inspector general, on May 13 at the urging
of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Linick had been investigating a number of
allegations against Pompeo. Among these were that he was using members of both
the State Department staff and his personal security detail to run private
errands for himself and his wife. He was also accused of hosting private
so-called “Madison Dinners” inside the State Department building for prospective donors, fundraisers and supporters
for Pompeo’s future political ambitions, including a possible U.S. Senate run
from his native Kansas.
But the most
serious allegation that Linick was investigating was that Pompeo had abused the
power of the Secretary of State to make an “emergency declaration” that allowed
the U.S. to sell arms to the government of Saudi Arabia. Thanks to Pompeo’s
“emergency declaration,” the sale went through despite opposition from members
of Congress, including some Republicans, who were worried that Saudi Arabia
would give the arms to the government of Yemen to commit war crimes against
civilians in their Saudi-backed war against the Houthi, a rebel group seeking
to overthrow the Yemeni government.
Trump’s letter
firing Linick was strikingly similar to the one he’d written against Atkinson,
saying he “no longer” had the “fullest confidence” in him. Reportedly Pompeo
asked Trump to fire Linick, and Trump had only one question for Pompeo about
Linick: “Who appointed him?” Once Pompeo said Linick had been an Obama
appointee, Trump agreed to let him go and replace him with proven Trump
loyalist Stephen Akard, an ally of Vice-President Mike Pence.
Trump’s Gleichschaltung Threatens Lives!
But President
Trump’s determination to rid the government of people he doesn’t consider
sufficiently “loyal” to him personally isn’t just interfering with the ability
of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress to keep
tabs on Cabinet departments and hold them, their secretaries and the President
accountable. In the current pandemic of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19, the
disease it causes, the President’s determination to rid the government of the
allegedly “disloyal” directly threatens the lives of Americans and others
throughout the world.
On May 10, the
long-running CBS-TV news program 60 Minutes reported on the decision of the U.S. National Institutes of Health
(NIH) to cancel a $3.7 million five-year grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a New
York-based group of viral researchers who work with similar organizations in
other countries to study both ongoing and potential viral pandemics (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-cancelled-coronavirus-research-grant-60-minutes-2020-05-10/).
Among the organizations EcoHealth Alliance and its director, Dr. Peter Daszak,
were working with was the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Wuhan is
generally believed to be where SARS-CoV-2 evolved and became a health threat
that eventually affected the whole world.
Though back in
January Trump was publicly praising China and its authoritarian president, Xi
Jiaoping, for having acted early and got a good start protecting its people and
the rest of the world against SARS-CoV-2, the White House “line” abruptly
changed in mid-March. Then Trump joined a lot of Right-wing media commentators,
including Sean Hannity of Fox News, who believed that the Wuhan Institute of
Virology had either been studying the new virus in their labs and had
accidentally released it into the population; or, worse, had deliberately
developed SARS-CoV-2 and let it loose around the world as a bioweapon.
Hannity publicly
questioned on his Fox News program why the U.S. government was giving money to
the Wuhan Institute of Virology (which it wasn’t) and called on the Trump
administration to pull the grant. The NIH accordingly canceled the funding just
a year after having renewed it and given it one of their highest
recommendations. Though the NIH refused to comment to 60 Minutes on why they’d pulled EcoHealth Alliance’s grant, Dr.
Daszak was scathing about the potential consequences.
“It matters
because number one, our work is used in developing vaccines and drugs to save
American lives and the lives of people around the world. So that matters a
lot,” Daszak told 60 Minutes reporter
Scott Pelley. “Number two, if we really want to know where viruses are going to
emerge and cause the next pandemic, we need to have scientific collaborations
like this. They’re our only eyes and ears on the ground in countries that are
very difficult, for political reasons, to work in.”
On May 17, a
week after breaking the story about the NIH defunding Dr. Peter Daszak’s
international viral research program, 60 Minutes presented an even more devastating story about the Trump
administration firing a scientist because he refused to toe the
administration’s line on SARS-CoV-2. This time the victim was Dr. Rick Bright,
who until April 2020 was the head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and
Development Agency (BARDA). Asked by interviewer Norah O’Donnell, who also
anchors the CBS Evening News,
what BARDA does, Dr. Bright said, “We focus on chemical threats, biological
threats such as anthrax, nuclear threats, radiological threats, pandemic
influenza, and emerging infectious diseases.”
Having studied
virology his entire life — he has a Ph.D. in virology — Dr. Bright recognized
early in January 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 had the potential to cause a pandemic. It
was, he said, “[a]n unknown virus infecting people, causing significant
mortality, and spreading. … It was just a matter of time before that virus then
jumped and left China, and appeared in other countries.” He thought his
colleagues at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shared his sense of
urgency — but was astonished that officials at the Department of Health and
Human Services (HHS), which oversees NIH, did not.
Dr. Bright
recalled a January 23 meeting chaired by Secretary Alex Azar, the head of HHS,
at which “I was the only person in the room … that said, ‘We’re going to need
vaccines and diagnostics and drugs. It’s going to take a while, but we need to
get started.’” Instead, Secretary Azar seemed to be intent on minimizing the
potential for a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic — and so did President Trump, who spoke in
Wisconsin January 30, at a time when there were only five COVID-19 cases in the
U.S. and ridiculed the whole idea that it could be a serious threat.
Ironically, Dr.
Bright said, just five months before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak a working group
from BARDA and other federal public health agencies had conducted a study
called “Crimson Contagion” about what might happen if a pandemic occurred.
“There were lessons about shortages of critical supplies such as personal
protective equipment; such as masks, N95 masks, gowns, goggles. And there were
lessons about the need for funding,” Dr. Bright told O’Donnell. “We had
practiced. We’d drilled. We’d been through Ebola. We’d been through Zika. We’d
been through H1N1. This was not a new thing for us. We knew exactly what to
do.”
Unfortunately,
they didn’t get the chance to do it. On January 25, Dr. Bright sent a memo to
his superiors warning that the entire U.S. health-care community would face a
“severe shortage of masks when the pandemic hit. Dr. Bright said they responded
“passively.” Though Dr. Bright had lined up a U.S. company that could have
turned out masks immediately, his superiors decided to wait for two months
before they ordered them — and they went to a firm in China to buy them. An
incredulous O’Donnell asked Dr. Bright if we’ve completely offshored our
ability to respond to a pandemic. Dr. Bright said, “We have offshored a lot of
our industry for critical supplies, critical health-care supplies, and critical
medicines, to save money.”
But the issue
that finally cost Dr. Bright his job — and cost Americans the benefits of his
expertise in researching viruses and developing vaccines and treatments against
them — was hydroxychloroquine. This is a well-known drug documented as
effective in treating malaria and lupus, but it’s been touted as a treatment
for COVID-19 even though, as the New England Journal of Medicine reported on June 20 (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2012410),
there is no “robust evidence supporting its use” for this disease. Other
studies have warned of potential side effects, including the risk that it could
cause heart attacks. “[T]he limited data available told us that it could be
dangerous,” Dr. Bright told O’Donnell. “It could have negative side effects,
and it could even lead to death.”
On April 20 the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning that
hydroxychloroquine should be used as a COVID-19 treatment only in a hospital
setting, and nearly two months later, on June 15 the FDA withdrew its emergency
approval of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment. Nonetheless, President
Trump not only pushed hydroxychloroquine and a related drug, chloroquine, as
“potential game-cbangers” in the fight against the pandemic, he went on the
drug himself for a week and a half even though he said his SARS-CoV-2 tests
were negative and he showed no symptoms.
On
April 21 Dr. Bright was fired as head of BARDA and given a demotion to a lesser
job in HHS. “I believe my last-ditch effort to protect Americans from that drug
was the final straw. That they used and believed was essential to push me out,”
he told O’Donnell on 60 Minutes.
Secretary Azar claimed that, far from opposing hydroxychloroquine, Dr. Bright
had actually signed the letter asking the FDA for emergency authorization to
use it. Dr. Bright told O’Donnell that that was technically true, but “I was
given a directive. I didn’t have a choice, other than to leave at that time.
And I went along and signed that letter, knowing that we had contained access
to that drug” by confining the FDA’s approval to hospitalized patients only.
Dr.
Bright filed an extensively documented whistleblower complaint over his
demotion that ran over 300 pages. His public statements and the whistleblower
complaint prompted an all too typical and predictable spew of insults from
President Trump at a May 13 press conference: “Honestly, it seems to me — I
watched this guy for a little while this morning. To me he’s nothing more than
a really disgruntled, unhappy person.”
“I am not
disgruntled,” Dr. Bright told O’Donnell. “I am frustrated at the lack of
leadership. I am frustrated at the lack of urgency to get a head start on
developing life-saving tools for Americans. I am frustrated at our inability to
be heard as scientists. Those things frustrate me.” (View the full interview
with Dr. Rick Bright at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rick-bright-whistleblower-trump-administration-coronavirus-pandemic-response/.)
Gleichschaltung Throughout Trump’s Presidency
Throughout his
Presidency — indeed, throughout his entire life — Donald Trump has shown an
utter intolerance for other people’s points of view and an insistence on “total
coordination and uniformity” within his organization. He made that clear during
the first week he was in office, when he signed a succession of sweeping,
far-reaching “executive orders” — directives to the entire federal government
which push the limits of the Constitutional powers of the Presidency — which
made him look less like a constitutionally elected leader than a South American
general who had just taken power in a coup d’état.
He made that
clear again when he met then-FBI director James Comey for dinner on January 27,
2017 — just one week into his Presidency — and, according to Comey’s later
testimony before Congress (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/james-comeys-opening-statement-on-trump-annotated/529521/),
Trump twice asked him to declare his “loyalty” — not to the Constitution or the fair enforcement of
federal law, but to Donald Trump personally. Comey described the interactions
this way in his opening statement to his Congressional testimony:
[The
President] said, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” I didn’t move,
speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence
that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then
moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner.
At one point, I
explained why it was so important that the FBI and the Department of Justice be
independent of the White House. I said it was a paradox: Throughout history,
some Presidents have decided that because “problems” come from Justice, they
should try to hold the Department close. But blurring those boundaries
ultimately makes the problems worse by undermining public trust in the institutions
and their work.
Near the end of
our dinner, the President returned to the subject of my job, saying he was very
glad I wanted to stay, adding that he had heard great things about me from Jim
Mattis, Jeff Sessions, and many others. He then said, “I need loyalty.” I
replied, “You will always get honesty from me.” He paused and then said,
“That’s what I want, honest loyalty.” I paused, and then said, “You will get
that from me.” As I wrote in the memo I created immediately after the dinner,
it is possible we understood the phrase “honest loyalty” differently, but I
decided it wouldn’t be productive to push it further. The term – honest loyalty
– had helped end a very awkward conversation and my explanations had made clear
what he should expect.
It obviously wasn’t what Trump expected — or wanted — because he fired
Comey three months later and has continued a steady stream of denunciations of
both him and his second-in-command, Andrew McCabe. In these pages, I noted that
during World War II the American servicemembers who fought had sworn an oath to
protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. The German, Italian and Japanese
soldiers they fought against had sworn an oath not to a constitution or to the nation as a whole, but
to a single person: Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini or Emperor Hirohito,
respectively. Indeed, Nazi Germany defined “the will of the Führer” as its ultimate legal authority.
Trump’s firing
of Comey, and the conversation between them that led up to it, indicated that
Trump had no desire to be a constitutionally elected leader with limited
powers. He wanted to be a dictator, a Führer, and he wanted the people on his staff and throughout the federal
government to swear the Führer
oath to him. And during the three years of his Presidency, he has consistently
and relentlessly purged anyone from the government who refused to take the oath
of “loyalty” to the person of Donald Trump.
Whatever Gleichschaltung meant in theory, in practice it meant the systematic
purge of independent-minded people from any positions of authority in the government of Germany
so Hitler could replace them with dedicated, fanatical Nazis. Indeed, Hitler
took it so far that even his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in
his diaries about his futile arguments with Hitler over whether the principal
qualification for jobs in the Nazi government should be a “low party number” —
i.e., someone who’d joined the Nazis early, well before they took power — or
actual ability to do the jobs.
Trump couldn’t
care less about the actual ability of his appointees to do the jobs to which
he’s appointed them. Nor does he care about their honesty. Despite all the
promises to “drain the swamp” of corrupt officials only in government service
for their personal gain, he’s appointed plenty of people like that to his
Cabinet and other high offices. (Indeed, since he seems to regard the
Presidency as largely a source of income for himself, he doesn’t seem to mind
if his appointees cut themselves in on a bit of the graft, too.) All that matters
is their personal loyalty to Donald Trump. Trump demands only two things from
his appointees: “make me look good” and “make me richer.”
The two men
Comey mentioned in his Congressional testimony as having said “great things
about me” to Trump — former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former Attorney
General Jeff Sessions — are both now on Trump’s scrap heap. Indeed, Trump fired
Sessions right after the 2018 midterm election, in which he kept Republican
control of the U.S. Senate but lost the House of Representatives to the
Democrats, and ultimately replaced him with William Barr, who has essentially
taken the Führer oath and turned the
Department of Justice into Trump’s legal handmaiden.
On the actual
issues, Jeff Sessions was as Right-wing as Right-wing could be. He eagerly
contributed to Trump’s jihad against
immigrants (and also contributed his nativist staff member, Stephen Miller, to
Trump’s White House staff). He denounced state laws allowing marijuana use and
pledged to use the federal government to crack down on them. He joined in the
Republicans’ assault on the ability of people to vote — especially young
people, poor people, people of color and others not likely to vote Republican.
But he was also
enough of an institutionalist to resist the pressure from Donald Trump to turn
the Justice Department into Trump’s personal fiefdom. Like Comey, Sessions
believed it was “important that the FBI and the Department of Justice be
independent of the White House.” When he found that the FBI was already investigating
allegations that the government of Russia, particularly its intelligence
services, had intervened in the 2016 U.S. election to help Trump and hurt
Hillary Clinton, Sessions recused himself from supervising the investigation on
the ground that as a key member of Trump’s campaign (and the first U.S. Senator
to endorse him), he had an inherent conflict of interest. Trump never forgave
him, and constantly ragged on Sessions in tweets, speeches and interviews until
he finally pushed Sessions out the door after nearly two years.
Trump’s current
Attorney General, William Barr, has been everything Trump could have wished for
— and did wish for in his WMAL-FM radio
interview with Larry O’Connor on November 2, 2017. Under Barr’s leadership, the
Justice Department has sought a reduced sentence for former Trump campaign
associate Roger Stone, convicted on eight counts including repeatedly lying to
Congress and intimidating a witness. One of the prosecutors in the Stone case,
Aaron Zelinsky, stepped down from it over the recommendation and testified to
the House Judiciary Committee June 25 that he and his fellow prosecutors were
pressured to give Stone “a break” — and the pressure came from the White House.
(https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/23/prosecutor-says-he-was-pressured-to-cut-roger-stone-a-break-because-of-his-ties-to-trump-336075)
Barr also
ordered prosecutors to drop the pending case against Michael Flynn, former
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Trump’s national security
advisor for the first three weeks of his Presidency. Flynn had twice pleaded
guilty of lying to the FBI in 2016 about his lobbying contacts with Russia and
Turkey, and it’s highly unusual for the Justice Department to drop a case in
which they’ve already won a conviction.
“Mr. Barr’s move
was widely seen
as extraordinary and a break with the Justice Department’s
approach in cases not involving a presidential favorite, fueling accusations of
politicization,” New York Times reporter
Charlie Savage wrote June 24 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/politics/michael-flynn-appeals-court.html).
“In particular, legal experts broadly disputed his notion that the false
statements were immaterial, since they bore on the broader counterintelligence
investigation into whether Trump campaign officials had coordinated with
Russia’s 2016 election interference.
The judge in the
case, Emmet T. Sullivan, balked at the dismissal and appointed a so-called
“special master” — a retired fellow judge — to argue the case that Flynn’s
guilty plea should stand. But on June 23 a sharply divided three-judge panel of
the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-1 decision ordering Sullivan to drop the Flynn prosecution. “The order
from the panel — a so-called writ of mandamus — was rare and came as a
surprise, taking its place as yet another twist in the extraordinary legal and
political drama surrounding the prosecution of Mr. Flynn,” Times reporter Savage wrote.
In addition to
protecting Trump friends and associates like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone,
William Barr has used his position as Attorney General to go after Trump’s
enemies, real or perceived. In late May Trump signed an extraordinary executive
order targeting Twitter and social media companies, just two days after Twitter
red-flagged two Trump tweets about the alleged potential for fraud in mail
voting and Trump accused the platform, which he has used extensively, of trying
to censor him.
“Trump’s order
aims to limit the companies’ legal immunity for how they moderate content
posted by users, a goal that legal experts said exceeds the president’s
authority unless he persuades Congress to change the law,” wrote Los Angeles
Times reporter Chris Megerian in a May 28
article (https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-05-28/trump-expected-to-sign-order-on-social-media).
“But the move could increase political and financial pressure on Twitter,
Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants by opening the door to
lawsuits and regulatory reviews.”
A month later,
on June 25, Los Angeles Times columnist
Harry Litman reported on an even more far-reaching assault on social media
companies by Attorney General Barr (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-25/willima-barr-vote-by-mail-antitrust-google-department-of-justice).
“Picking up on Trump’s bitter but unsubstantiated criticism of Facebook,
Twitter and other internet companies, Barr is determined to rattle the DOJ’s
antitrust saber at Silicon Valley, and first up is the advertising and search
giant Google,” Litman wrote. “According to various news reports, the department
is already drafting an antitrust complaint against Google and interviewing
lawyers to prosecute the case. That’s after only a year of investigation, which
is actually warp speed in terms of bringing an antitrust complaint.”
While
progressives and leftists have called on the federal government to investigate
the social-media giants both for their economic power and their potential
political influence, Barr’s attack on Google and threats to other companies
like Facebook and Twitter is, among other things, a threat to force them to
highlight more Right-wing voices and be more sympathetic to Trump. In a Fox
News interview, Barr quoted Right-wing Congressmember and fanatical Trump
supporter Devin Nunes (R-California) as saying the big social-media platforms
censored conservatives, and added, “One way that this can be addressed,” Barr
went on, “is through the antitrust laws and challenging companies that engage
in monopolistic practices.”
Barr also
attacked voting by mail in the same Fox interview in which he threatened
antitrust prosecution against Google. Echoing Trump, who has attacked voting by
mail as inherently fraudulent even though Trump votes by mail himself, Barr
said that mail voting “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud. Those things
are delivered into mailboxes. They can be taken out. There’s questions about
whether or not it even denies a secret ballot.”
“Barr has shown
himself willing to use his vast powers in the service of the president’s
political interests,” Litman wrote. “So when he lays out an election-year
agenda that plainly coincides with Republican Party interests, we should take
him at his word: The DOJ is gearing up for a battle on behalf of Trump. The
conduct will be dressed up in law enforcement garb, but the attorney general is
being nakedly partisan.”
Trump’s attitude
towards law enforcement, his demands of a complaisant Attorney General, his
disinterest in other people’s points of view and his Gleichschaltung-like insistence on “loyalty” as the number one
quality he expects from his staff — not idealism, integrity or even competence
— is yet more evidence that Trump has no interest, and never had any interest,
in being a powerful but constitutionally limited President of the United
States. Instead, he wants to be a dictator, ruling by decree and with either a
rubber-stamp legislature or no legislature at all — just like Vladimir Putin of
Russia, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and all the
other despots he admires and fawns over at international meetings.
If the voters of
the United States of America want their country to remain a democracy — even the
limited bourgeois republican democracy it has historically been — they will
HAVE to reject President Trump decisively in the November 2020 election and
vote for the only candidate who, despite his own flaws, has a chance of
defeating and replacing Trump: the likely Democratic Party nominee, former
Vice-President Joe Biden.
