The Week in Washington: “Absolute Fealty at All Times!”
Should you be happy that the notorious warmonger John Bolton was fired by Donald Trump this week? (Or Bolton quit, depending on who you talk to.) Reportedly, Trump dumped Bolton, his now-former national security advisor, because Bolton was foaming at the mouth to start an armed conflict with Iran and/or North Korea and/or Venezuela. But maybe Trump just couldn’t stand him: After all, Bolton is the guy that even Tucker Carlson once described as a “bureaucratic tapeworm,” who seems to live “forever in the bowels of the federal agencies, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering, but, critically, somehow never suffering himself.”
Or maybe Bolton just wasn’t enough of a suck-up? On Wednesday, the Washington Post described the current White House atmosphere: “In President Trump’s renegade orbit, there are unspoken rules he expects his advisers to follow. He tolerates a modicum of dissent, so long as it remains private; expects advisers to fall in line and defend his decisions; and demands absolute fealty at all times.” In any case, this is also a big win for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the king of absolute fealty, who reportedly loathed Bolton.
If you thought Bolton couldn’t possibly be replaced by someone just as creepy, you were wrong. Trump’s new acting national security advisor is Charles Kupperman, a sterling character who was for nearly a decade on the board of directors of the Center for Security Policy, which repeatedly promoted the conspiracy theory that some in the Obama administration wanted Islamic law in the United States.
On Wednesday, as the nation remembered the victims of 9/11, Trump was tweeting, “The Wall is going up very fast despite total Obstruction by Democrats in Congress, and elsewhere!” He also found time to retweet this eloquent sentiment from Brad Parscale, his campaign manager for the 2020 reelection campaign: “Socialism SUCKS and @TeamTrump is flying high above the Dem debate in Houston to remind the circus in town that their policies will hurt Houston, Texas and America!”
Monday found the president flying high to North Carolina to campaign for Dan Bishop, a Republican state senator running in a special House election in that state. The next day, Bishop, an NRA darling and sponsor of the so-called bathroom bill, which required transgender people to use restrooms that corresponded with the gender on their birth certificate, beat out his moderate Democratic opponent by a very small margin. (Some Dems spun this narrow defeat as a sort of victory, which, I guess if you squint, it kind of is. But not really.)
In other news, on Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee finally approved a resolution meant to define the rules of an impeachment investigation. But depending on who you talk to, maybe this isn’t an impeachment inquiry after all? Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler largely says, Yup, that’s what it is; but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is still ducking and dodging when the “I” word comes up. “If we have to go there, we'll have to go there. But we can't go there unless we have the facts, and we will follow the facts . . . and make our decision when we're ready . . . That's all I'm going to say about this subject,” she declared after the vote. (Currently, more than 130 House Democrats are on record to be in favor of going “there.”)
Lastly, in the wake of Hurricane Dorian, a White House official said that the United States is not planning to allow temporary protected immigration status for displaced residents of the Bahamas. The TPS program was designed to protect foreign nationals from being required to return to countries in the aftermath of things like a devastating natural disaster or war—but apparently not in this case. In language reminiscent of his Mexicans-are-rapists rhetoric, the president described concerns about those seeking refuge as “some very bad people and some very bad gang members and . . . drug dealers.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
