This week, Republican Senators like Maine’s Susan Collins and Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander who have claimed that President Donald Trump “learned his lesson” from the impeachment proceedings got a dose of reality when the president fired administration officials who’d testified against him. Those kicked out of the job include the National Security Council’s Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who’d been serving as a point person for Ukraine policy when he testified against the president, revealing his scheme to bribe Ukraine into investigating his opponents. In a new piece for The New York Times, subject matter expert Dr. John Gans calls attention to Vindman’s firing representing animosity not just against the Purple Heart recipient-turned witness but also against the whole national security apparatus.
Parallel to attempts elsewhere in the federal government to dial back sizes of the workforce in areas that the president doesn’t care much about, throughout the last about six months, Trump’s current national security adviser Robert O’Brien “cut 60 to 70 positions, about a third of the staff, many of them career professionals” and “directed that the National Security Council focus less on transnational issues like global economics and nonproliferation, and more on bilateral and geographic priorities,” Gans explains. That translates into an increased focus on protecting Trump’s fiercely nationalistic vision for the U.S., and he and his team are working to completely kick out the people who might diverge.
Gans comments:
‘Mr. O’Brien’s trumpification of the staff will hamper the United States’ ability to meet the world’s challenges, and hamstring the next president… Whoever replaces Mr. Trump will inherit a weaker and less worldly National Security Council, and learn the hard way it’s far easier to deconstruct a staff than rebuild one. As a result, even after Mr. Trump leaves the White House, Trumpism will continue to corrupt American foreign policy.’
And as Gans also notes, that state of affairs is a dramatically different situation than the one that Trump faced when he first assumed office. Barack Obama left behind a strengthened and competent National Security Council, Gans writes, but Trump responded to that with messages like what one anonymous staffer shares came from an also anonymous Trump political appointee. That appointee insisted to council staff:
‘The president doesn’t care about the things you care about, and the sooner that you know about it, the better.’
So in short, the structure of U.S. plans to deal with national security issues is getting reshaped to more closely mirror the personal whims of documented egomaniac Donald Trump. What could go wrong! (Lots of things, obviously.)
Trump’s time in office has already been marked by plenty of foreign policy disaster. His abruptly ordered strike on top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani launched the U.S. and Middle East region into turmoil that included the death of 176 airline passengers accidentally shot down by Iranians attempting to respond to U.S. provocation and traumatic brain injuries for dozens of U.S. servicemembers who were at bases that the Iranians attacked.
Trump dismissed at least some of those injuries as supposedly just headaches, and there’s no sign that he plans on letting up with his relentlessly self-centered decision-making anytime soon.
