I&I Editorial
Two news stories published over the weekend had the same message. The State Department was out to get President Donald Trump after suffering years of “frustration.” At least these denizens of the deep state are being honest.
Politico’s 2,000-word story – titled “The Revenge of the State Department” – begins by reporting on the fact “current and former Foreign Service officers have defied Trump administration orders and trudged to Capitol Hill to testify before House committees investigating whether to impeach the president.”
These officials, the story says, are “furious,” “terrified,” “incredulous,” “disappointed,” “fed up,” “livid,” with a “deep well of resentment,” in an “unbearable” situation.
Some of them, Politico reports, are using the hearings as a “platform to air long-held grievances over Trump.”
And their colleagues are “hailing them as heroes.”
What, exactly, are these career State Department bureaucrats angry about?
They’re mad that several of them “were demoted or sidelined following attacks by the conservative media.”
They complain about what they see as Trump’s “dangerous brand of diplomatic malpractice.”
They’re upset that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo didn’t publicly support Marie Yavonovitch after Trump removed her from her post as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and that Pompeo “is willing to sell out the department to keep favor with Trump.”
They’re also enraged that Pompeo gave a speech to the American Association of Christian Counselors and talked openly about the importance of his faith. That, according to Politico, “troubled many diplomats.”
William Burns, deputy secretary of State under President Barack Obama, declared in an article in Foreign Affairs said to “turned heads” in Washington that Trump’s treatment of State Department officials was akin to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s “savage campaign against ‘disloyalty’ in the State Department.”
Burns conveniently overlooks the fact that there were communists in the State Department. And Pompeo remarked that he appeared to be auditioning to be Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s secretary of state.”
The AP story is more of the same. Diplomats are fuming because of Trump’s push to cut budgets and staff, and this is “a moment of catharsis.”
So what we have here are career bureaucrats who don’t like the way Trump is conducting foreign policy. Why? Because they know better than some outsider who doesn’t play according to the rules. There is no question that many of them would be delighted to see Trump removed from office, not because he did anything impeachable, but because they can’t abide by the 2016 election results.
Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had it exactly right when he said that “career bureaucrats … are saying, ‘You know what? I don’t like President Trump’s politics so I’m going to participate in this witch hunt.’”
Add this to what we’ve learned about how the intelligence community and the FBI have tried to undermine the Trump administration – events chillingly recounted in Andrew McCarthy’s must-read book “Ball of Collusion.” In it, he shows how the liberal Washington establishment “exploited its control of law-enforcement and intelligence to help Clinton and undermine Trump. This is a scandalous abuse of power.”
Trump’s critics say that his claims about a deep state are the result of his paranoid delusions. But after what the country has witnessed over the past three years, and now the bragging by State Department officials bent on getting Trump out of Washington, it’s the denial of the deep state that is delusional.
— Written by John Merline
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