This whole thing is surreal. Kelly, Barr, Bolton, Mattis, etc. All have been disloyal backstabbers. You would think they’d at least have the decency to keep their mouths shut. But it would be remiss not to mention that Trump appointed every last one of them. Is Trump that poor a judge of character?
And no, I don’t buy the argument that the Senate wouldn’t have confirmed anyone else. No appointment is better than a bad appointment.
A Freeper recently said that Trump would have been better off randomly picking people from a telephone book. That sounds about right.
The president chose experienced, knowledgeable people to put in his cabinet. Unfortunately the only way to get experienced and knowledgeable in fedgov operations is to give your loyalty to it. Random people in the phonebook might have been more reliably loyal, but too incompetent to actually achieve anything.
Maybe Trump is a poor judge of character, but he had a bad pool to choose from and how many of us thought they were good and solid until they showed their true character and loyalties?
Before Trump, there was eight years of W. Bush being a war President. The congress and military leadership liked that, while Democrats pretended to fight it. Then we got Obama who threw much of the military's gains away, gave them new wars to fight while not finishing the old ones. The congress and military leadership were OK with that.
Then we got Trump, who had enough of war, and no one in Congress or the military or congress liked that at all. Including all the antiwar activists who were largely silent for the last four years.
What I realized after Trump was in office was the way Obama was especially bad. It was not just his policies. It was how he affected the running of the Federal government. He let everyone in the Federal Government to feed their vices unchecked by any restraint. Hillary and Biden got to line their pockets (the real Ukraine scandal). Congress doubled the national debt and patted themselves on the back. The military got to emphasis special and covert operations, without clear national policy as to what the goals were. Mueller then Comey turned the FBI and the FISA courts into near secret police above the law.
When Trump came in, massive corruption was normalized, and he was the enemy. The FBI did not want Flynn auditing what was going on in Intelligence, and wanted to cover themselves, so he was the first that had to go. Framing a General to protect themselves was not a problem for the DOJ and FBI, and the news and congress went along with it.
That is what Trump was up against from the day Hillary found out she was not elected queen.
(Apologies for the half response and half rant. The last two months have been to much and the next four years are going to redefine what suck means.)
“A Freeper recently said that Trump would have been better off randomly picking people from a telephone book. That sounds about right.”
I agree. In retrospect Mike Pence was a wrong pick too. A blunder in fact. But to be fair back then Trump didn’t know the swamp as well as he does now.