The insistence that President Trump’s primary goal is to take some kind of vengeance on his enemies is only possible if you ignore a mounting body of evidence that all isn’t well with the government, particularly at the leadership level.
Shortly before the election, Republicans accused the Biden-Harris administration of political discrimination after two devastating hurricanes hit the Southeast, claiming Republicans were not being provided the same level of aid and service as Democrats in the wake of a natural disaster. On September 30, once and future President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social in advance of a trip to the storm ravaged regions of Georgia and North Carolina. “I’ll be there shortly, but I don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the State, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” This was enough to prompt President Joe Biden himself to respond, almost immediately labeling the accusation completely false, a “reckless, irresponsible, relentless promotion of disinformation.” “It’s beyond ridiculous,” the President said from the White House. “In moments like this, there are no red or blue states. There’s one United States of America, where neighbors are helping neighbors.” Vice President Kamala Harris posted something similar on Facebook, “Donald Trump is flat-out lying about the relief available to Americans who are suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. It is wrong, it is dangerous, and it is preventing people from getting the help that they desperately need. Let me be clear: Disaster funds are being used to help Americans in need.” The New York Times, CNN, and most of their comrades in the mainstream media all claimed the charge – along with several others, namely that funds had been repurposed from disaster relief to migrant shelters – was completely false, unconscionable, and counter productive, hurting the very people President Trump was insisting needed our help the most. The outrage that anyone would suggest such a thing was palpable in every fact check, and yet less than a week after the election, we learned that President Trump was correct in his assertion. FEMA, the agency responsible for hurricane relief, was in fact displaying bias against Republicans, publicly admitting that an employee had been fired for urging staff to skip houses with Trump campaign signs and other accouterments. The official, who was responsible for workers canvassing Lake Placid, Florida, told her team to “avoid homes advertising Trump” in an internal message, what was described as a “best practices” guidance in the lead up to the election itself. The workers themselves took note of which houses were skipped, writing “Trump sign no entry per leadership” in their tracking system while FEMA itself described the incident as reprehensible, blaming it on a single rogue employee. “More than 22,000 FEMA employees every day adhere to FEMA’s core values and are dedicated to helping people before, during and after disasters, often sacrificing time with their own families to help disaster survivors,” they wrote in a statement. “Recently, one FEMA employee departed from these values to advise her survivor assistance team to not go to homes with yard signs supporting President-elect Trump. This is a clear violation of FEMA’s core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation. This was reprehensible…This employee has been terminated and we have referred the matter to the Office of Special Counsel. I will continue to do everything I can to make sure this never happens again.”
Shortly after the statement was issued, the employee in question, Marn’i Washington, publicly disputed the idea that this political bias was an isolated incident, claiming it was standard practice because of the potential for conflict. “They all allege that these actions were made in my own recognizance and that it was for my own political advances,” she told the Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast a few days later. “However, if you look at the record, there is what we call a ‘community trend,’ and, unfortunately, it just so happened that the political hostility that was encountered by my team … they just so happened to have the Trump campaign signage,” she said leading to instructions from FEMA for an “avoidance” and de-escalation policy, which roughly amounts to blaming Republicans for being upset the government was showing bias in the first place. “Senior leadership will lie to you and tell you that they do not know,” she continued, “but if you ask the DSA [disaster survivor assistance] crew leads and specialists what they are experiencing in the field, they will tell you, FEMA always preaches avoidance first and then de-escalation, so this is not isolated. This is a colossal event of avoidance not just in the state of Florida, but you will find avoidance in the Carolinas.” In a more rational, fair age, this would be huge news, especially after so much ink was shed claiming the President couldn’t be possibly be right, but perhaps needless to say, neither The New York Times, CNN, or any others, have retracted their previous “fact checks” in light of the firing or Ms. Washington’s subsequent statement, much less apologized to either Donald Trump or Republicans affected. Instead, they have been focused almost exclusively on the incoming President’s supposedly “controversial Cabinet picks” to use CNN’s description from Stephen Collinson, believing they represent a unique threat to the government and are being selected to wreak vengeance rather than right wrongs. In Mr Collinson’s view, which is generally tame by media standards, “Donald Trump’s increasingly provocative Cabinet picks have left some Republican senators aghast and Washington in shock. But they really shouldn’t. Because the outrage is the point. The president-elect reached a new level on Wednesday, announcing Florida Republican Matt Gaetz — one of his most zealous agents of disruption, who, like him, was once investigated by the Justice Department — as his pick for attorney general. Tulsi Gabbard, the one-time Democratic presidential candidate, who now shares Trump’s belief that the intelligence community has been weaponized against him, will be America’s new top spy, if confirmed as director of national intelligence. The latest selections for Trump’s MAGA dream team caused such a stir that they almost overshadowed the pick of Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth to serve as defense secretary on Tuesday night. But they are perfectly in tune with Trump’s campaign trail promises and political project. The dismay engulfing establishment elites contrasted with the euphoria rocketing through conservative networks and social media among Trump fans. The president-elect draws political strength from his position as an outsider scourge of the establishment, and if his picks are confirmed by the Senate — a huge if in the case of Gaetz — they will be tasked with his mission of defenestrating government and driving out those Trump sees as enemies.”
Equally needless to say, neither Mr. Collinson nor any others making similar claims ever pause to consider President Trump’s selections in light of the scandal engulfing FEMA, which given the two stories are unfolding side by side, should rightly be considered a case study in what is wrong with the government as it’s currently constituted and why Trump has chosen a Cabinet of outsiders instead of insiders, disrupters rather than conformists. In this case, the agency itself admitted that there are most certainly the equivalent of “enemies” in its own ranks, recently taking the unusual step of driving one of them out. The person in question further insists that her actions weren’t isolated and are a systemic problem. Doesn’t that make it possible, as conservatives have long insisted, that the weaponization of the government is real, or at least worthy of investigation, and if so, who better to lead these agencies than those who are already deeply skeptical? It’s not as if FEMA is the only possible example of government bias and incompetence in recent years. As early as 2012, the Obama Administration admitted that the Internal Revenue Service had improperly if not illegally targeted conservative non-profit groups for extra scrutiny, preventing their ability to organize in advance of the election. In 2016, the Department of Justice opened an improper investigation into the campaign of then candidate Donald Trump, illegally surveilling him well into his first term. This included at least 17 instances of mistakes or misconduct found by the Inspector General, up to and including withholding information and altering evidence. Special Counsel John Durham issued an equally scathing report after a multiyear investigation. He concluded, “The [Justice] Department and the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to law. Senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor toward the information they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons or entities.” Since then, the American public has witnessed the radically different way Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden were treated for potentially mishandling classified documents. While the cases are not the same, there’s plenty of reason to wonder why one was the subject of an FBI raid and one wasn’t, why one was charged and one wasn’t. There’s also the supporting matter of Justice Department leaks, which generally speaking seem to target conservatives much more so than progressives. For example, President Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, is regularly maligned in progressive circles for being “credibly accused” of sexual assault including those involving under age women who might or might not have been paid for sex, but he was never charged, much less found guilty of any such crime, nor has any woman come forward and publicly accused him. The only reason we are aware of anything at all is because the Justice Department illegally leaked an investigation into him, one that presumably found so little evidence, they declined to prosecute, resulting in the potentially false tarnishing of his name for political purposes.
Beyond potential political bias, basic competence is also a concern. Following the disastrous pull out from Afghanistan, our failure to prevent or resolve the war in Ukraine and war in the Middle East, we have every reason to doubt the current leadership, particularly at the Departments of Defense and State, has either the skills or the honesty necessary to protect American interests. In Afghanistan in particular, we now know that the military left the country without a plan to protect our diplomats, allies, and equipment, and some in the military have blamed it on the current crop of four star generals. According to Politico’s reporting in 2021, the “priority for the Pentagon was to protect U.S. troops and pull them out, even as diplomats and Afghan allies stayed behind.” “The one-stars and two-stars.… They are very discouraged because I think it shows some serious flaws in our four-star leadership,” a senior official told the outlet. “To me that was a big mistake by our military: they didn’t have to get them out that fast and they could have kept open some other options. The military should’ve pushed back harder and not pulled their people out the minute they didn’t win the argument with Blinken and Biden.” In Ukraine, we were told for months before the war began that sanctions would be an effective deterrence, only to be told they were never for deterrence, but they could bring the war to a swift conclusion by collapsing the Russian economy, none of which has come to fruition as the conflict rages on. In the Middle East, we were told the region was so quiet, the Biden-Harris Administration could prioritize other parts of the world while Hamas, backed by Iran, was planning the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, resulting in the deaths of some 1,200 civilians including women and children. We have also been unable to secure the release of American hostages for more than a year, or prevent the conflict from spreading to Lebanon and a series of direct confrontations between Israel and Iran for the first time in both country’s histories. Elsewhere in the government, the Centers for Disease Control and prevention didn’t exactly shower itself with glory during the pandemic, especially regarding recommendations for an unproven vaccine followed by supporting a never-before-in-history vaccine mandate.
I could go on, but whether the situation is as bad as conservatives like myself claim and the government has been weaponized or less nefarious and it’s simply incompetent beyond belief, something is obviously wrong in these and other cases. That something requires both an explanation and a course correction. The insistence that President Trump’s primary goal is to take some kind of vengeance on his enemies is only possible if you ignore a mounting body of evidence that all isn’t well with the government, particularly at the leadership level. From this perspective, there is a brilliant subversiveness to Trump’s choices. For perhaps the first time in history, a President has selected a Cabinet that can best be described as deeply skeptical of their own departments, at worst outright hostile to them at least in parts. I might well quibble or criticize some of the specific choices, Pete Hegseth, for example, has not managed anything nearly as large or complex as the Department of Defense, nor has Congressman Matt Gaetz the Department of Justice, but on a broader level this is a bold and brilliant strategic move, especially when President Trump ran in part on both the weaponization of government and the need to disrupt calcified institutions. If the reaction from the champions of government and those institutions is any indication, he’s already doing that before taking office. The government itself has been put on notice, and that’s clearly a good thing.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 