Axios reports on a future possible firing by the Trump Administration:
President Trump has told confidants he’s eager to remove Dan Coats as director of national intelligence, according to five sources who have discussed the matter directly with the president.
The state of play: Trump hasn’t told our sources when he plans to make a move, but they say his discussions on the topic have been occurring for months — often unprompted — and the president has mentioned potential replacements since at least February. A source who spoke to Trump about Coats a week ago said the president gave them the impression that the move would happen “sooner rather than later.”
Axios goes on to mention a possible successor, but Kerry Eleveld’s vivid post on The Daily Kos triggered thoughts on the internal culture of the Administration:
Trump has been floating the name of Fred Fleitz as a replacement for Coats, saying he’s heard “great things.” Fleitz was John Bolton’s chief of staff on the National Security Counsel, so that might be one source of Fleitz’s “great” reviews.
But more importantly for Trump, Fleitz went on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business show to criticize Coats’ congressional testimony on North Korea and call for his ouster over his “second-guessing” of Trump. Oh, and in 2017, Fleitz also called the intelligence assessment about Russian interference “rigged.”
“I don’t use this word lightly, I think this assessment was rigged,” Fleitz said. “I think it was rigged to come up with the most negative conclusion possible to hurt Mr. Trump. … I think it was fabricated.”
In an op-ed on FoxNews.com in January 2017, Fleitz similarly wrote, “I also suspect the entire purpose of this report and its timing was to provide President Obama with a supposedly objective intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election that the president could release before he left office to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s election.”
It’s outrageous, when you think about it. A potential successor attempting to sabotage a high level official in the Administration in hopes of gaining the same position for himself is, I suppose, not unheard of, but for me it’s a signal of the culture of, well, unrestrained ambition that pervades the Administration. DNI Coats, former Senator for Indiana, appears to be an old-line Republican, which means he’s honorable, much like Special Counsel Mueller, and not a member of the greed-greed group within – or perhaps making up – the Republican Party these days.
But there’s no reason to believe that tomorrow’s target won’t be a full-fledged member of the Trump Party. See, we’re talking here about the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys work together to achieve their goals, and the subsumption of personal ambition to a great degree is the enabling factor behind the success of such groups.
The bad guys? Continual infighting. If you’ve watched The Man In The High Castle (or, to a lesser degree, read the book), it illustrates how the power struggles, the free rein given to ambition and the resultant tolerance for the playing out of that ambition, i.e., the violence and death and abrogation of the law in pursuit of that ambition, is what tears apart such organizations, in particular disillusioning the mass of people who provide the backbone of such movements.
Francisco Franco.
This is not always true, of course: the dictatorship of Francisco Franco lasted decades. although I see Wikipedia states:
… scholars consider Franco as conservative and authoritarian, rather than truly fascist. Historian Stanley G. Payne states, “scarcely any of the serious historians and analysts of Franco consider the Generalissimo to have been a core fascist.”
I am not enough of a student of the ways of fascism and authoritarianism to understand their differences, much less analyze how culture, outside threats, mass psychology, and the mythologies of the culture can play together to hold a leader in his place, but I am aware of those currents. Or we can point to the Soviet Union, a politically repressive and savage nation, hiding behind a collection of prima facie progressive political slogans and whatnot, and most importantly springing from political cultures which were equally if not even more repressive than the Soviets, that survived for seventy years. Context is darn near everything, a facet we ignore every time we go “nation-building”, it seems.
But to return to American soil, I’ve been puzzling over the behavior of AG William Barr. This morning it occurred to me that he may have ambitions beyond the Department of Justice. After all, he’s been approved by the Senate, which means he could move to the leadership of another department with relative ease. I’m not even sure he’d require confirmation by the Senate for such a move.
Or could he be angling towards replacing Pence on the upcoming election ticket? It’s not impossible, as Pence is more or less a zero on the campaign trail – Trump’s the big attraction, and wouldn’t tolerate another big attraction on the ticket with him, so we know Pence is a placeholder. Barr certainly lacks the charisma that supposedly surrounds Trump, so Trump would tolerate him. And after that, he’d be the incumbent VP, ready to assume the mantle of the nomination with Trump’s blessing, assuming a Trump victory in the 2024 campaign. All based on him not displaying competence, but simply pleasing Trump.
The question is whether or not Barr can dine al fresco on the entrails of his competitors without ripping apart the entire movement by exposing naked and ugly ambition. I see Barr as the dark horse in 2020. Let’s see if he makes it onto the ticket.
