No Parades for a President “Drunk on Power”

“Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation,” retired Navy Admiral William H. McRaven, former head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, wrote in The Washington Post on Thursday. McRaven was responding to President Trump’s decision to revoke the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan seemingly to punish Brennan for his frank and fearless comments, which have lately included the assessment that the president is “drunk on power.” McRaven continued, “If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken. The criticism will continue until you become the leader we prayed you would be.”

So far, the power of prayer has failed us miserably. On Tuesday, Trump called his former senior advisor Omarosa Manigault Newman a dog, and said he only hired her the first place because she was a “crazed, crying lowlife” who said great things about him. Which makes you wonder, is that how the other “best people” that Trump promised he would employ got their jobs—by obsequious drooling and blubbering? Well, maybe. Consider for a moment some of those who have gone before: the insanely profligate former EPA head Scott Pruitt; the loose-lipped and profane Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted as White House communications director a whole 10 days; the White House aide and alleged wife-beater Rob Porter; the venal anti-Muslim theorist and former Trump deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka; the lying national security advisor and Russophile Mike Flynn, who has flipped and is cooperating with the Mueller investigation; and of course erstwhile campaign manager Paul Manafort, charged with tax evasion and bank fraud, whose fate is being deliberated by jurors right now.

In other bad news of the week, on Monday President Trump signed a $716 billion defense-policy bill named for John McCain but did not deign to mention the senator’s name even once. On Tuesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders told the press corps she couldn’t guarantee that the president had never uttered the N-word. On Wednesday, sounding increasingly cornered, Trump trotted out for the millionth time on Twitter: “The Rigged Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on as the ‘originators and founders’ of this scam continue to be fired and demoted for their corrupt and illegal activity. All credibility is gone from this terrible Hoax, and much more will be lost as it proceeds. No Collusion!” On Thursday, the $92 million military parade that he had been dreaming of was cancelled, and he said he would attend the one in Paris instead. (Maybe the French can borrow that giant inflatable ugly-Trump bébé from their British compatriots for the occasion?) By Friday, Kellyanne Conway was asking reporters plaintively, “Why is everybody so obsessed with the president of the United States that they can’t even begin or finish a sentence without mentioning his name five times? It’s kind of weird.” (Because, um, they are the White House press corps and it’s their job?)

Clearly not satisfied with apparently forcing the firing of Peter Strzok from the FBI—the agent had revealed in personal text messages before the election that he thought a Trump victory would be a disaster—the president is now foaming at the mouth about someone called Bruce Ohr, a Justice Department employee, because, as far as we can tell, years ago Ohr worked with Christopher Steele, author of the famous pee-tape dossier, and these days, the merest guilt by association is apparently enough to get you canned.

But who says there isn’t a glimmer of hope to light our way on the road to November 6? On Thursday, the Senate took the unprecedented step of affirming unanimously that the media is not the enemy of the people; that same day more than 300 newspapers, from The Denver Post in Colorado to The Oak Ridger in Tennessee, from the Miami Herald in Florida to the Griggs County Courier in North Dakota, published editorials affirming the fundamental right to a free press. And by Friday, more than 70 former intelligence officials, responding to the Brennan situation, had signed on to a statement stating their belief “that former government officials have the right to express their unclassified views on what they see as critical national security issues without fear of being punished for doing so.”

We suspect that someday soon, having your security clearance yanked by President Trump will confer bragging rights, much as being included on Nixon’s infamous enemy list was a point of pride a half century ago. As Admiral McRaven put it, addressing the president directly: “I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency.”

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