I cringed when I read my news feed and found a reference to Trump and his hope for a terrorist attack to save himself and the GOP. My next question was how do I responsibly report such an explosive claim. The answer is simple, the president’s actions.
The GOP is in dire straits and could lose 2018 in a landslide, but the president believes a terrorist attack could change the entire equation.
Buried within the Washington Post article titled “New alarm among Republicans that Democrats could win big this year” there is a paragraph that should concern every American.
In private conversations, Trump has told advisers that he doesn’t think the 2018 election has to be as bad as others are predicting. He has referenced the 2002 midterms, when George W. Bush and Republicans fared better after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, these people said.
One could easily disregard a statement like that if it were not coming from a president who thinks solely about himself, a president that puts his interests ahead of that of the country and its citizens. After all, he was willing to cause the deaths of many Americans with the failed passage of Trumpcare just to say he had a win.
But this is more profound. Trump has decimated the State Department. As reported in Vox,
Imagine a company where, in the past year, 60 percent of its top management quit and applicants to work there dropped by half. You’d assume that corporation would be on the verge of going bankrupt or in the throes of some catastrophe — Enron after the scandal or Lehman Brothers during the financial crisis.
This is the reality of the US State Department under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, according to new data from the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), the professional organization for America’s diplomatic corps. The numbers reveal that American diplomacy, the backbone of US global influence, is in a state of near collapse.
And it’s basically all the Trump administration’s fault. …
“Secretary Tillerson’s term has led to widespread demoralization in the foreign service, the dismissal or resignation of people with expertise that individually may not be irreplaceable but as a cohort certainly becomes so,” Paul Musgrave, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told me earlier this year. “That hinders the State Department’s ability to enhance US interests through diplomacy.”
When we compromise diplomacy, our security is at risk as we cannot expect the same sort of intelligence that would warn us of an impending attack.
Worse, however, is the appointment of an unqualified Homeland Security Secretary. The Hill reported the following reservations Democrats had on her nomination.
Democrats raised concerns during her confirmation hearing about her lack of leadership experience, noting that DHS is a sprawling agency with roughly 240,000 employees.
“Why should we believe that, as smart as you are, and as well-spoken as you are, that someone who, as far as I know, never led an organization of even 100 people, much less 240,000, is ready to take on this responsibility?” Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) asked during her confirmation hearing.
Nielsen’s nomination was also held up for a week in the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee after members sent her more than 200 requests for follow-up information.
These realities give concerns about the president’s statement. Is he leaving the country vulnerable to a terrorist attack for personal and party gain? It’s not about his words. It is about his actions.