Trump exacts revenge on former allies who criticized him
At the end of January, President Trump issued executive orders that revoked security details for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Dr. Anthony Fauci — despite ongoing, credible threats against their lives.
“Do you want to have a large detail of people guarding people for the rest of their lives?” Trump asked. “I mean, there’s risks to everything.”
Asked if he would feel partially responsible if something happened to any of them, Trump replied, “Certainly I would not … They made a lot of money. They can hire their own security.” The president offered to give them the phone numbers of “some good security companies.”
A few days ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cancelled the security detail protecting retired Gen. Mark Milley and ordered an inquiry to determine if he should be demoted.
Combined with his pardons and commutations for Jan. 6 rioters and convicted seditious conspirators, and the cancellation of security clearances for dozens of his political adversaries, Trump's actions have launched what could be called the “imperious presidency.”
The federal government has an obligation to protect its public servants from job-related threats. One can hope that all Americans will condemn putting these men in harm’s way because they corrected, criticized or condemned their former boss.
John Bolton, U.N. ambassador under President George W. Bush, had a well-deserved reputation as a brutally candid, hard-to-like foreign policy hawk. He replaced Gen. H.R. McMaster as Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2018. At the time, Trump praised Bolton as a patriot, “well-respected and a tough cookie,” saying he “has strong views on things but that’s okay.”
Bolton helped craft the administration’s hard line on Iran, but he opposed what he regarded as Trump’s dovish overtures to North Korea and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Nor was he a fan of the president’s “we’ll have to see response” to questions about whether the U.S. would recognize Russia’s territorial claims in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Trump fired Bolton in 2019. “He wasn’t liked at all and wasn’t respected very much,” Trump declared in 2020. “Personally, I thought he was crazy.”
By then, Bolton was casting doubt on Trump’s fitness to be president. He subsequently deemed Trump “incapable of advanced thinking” and “practicing obstruction of justice as a way of life.”
In 2022, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was charged with plotting to murder Bolton. An Iranian was subsequently charged (in absentia) for offering $300,000 to kill Bolton. Officials in two federal agencies recently informed Bolton that the threat level is just as strong now as it was then.
Mike Pompeo, a member of the House from 2011 to 2017, occupied high-level positions throughout Trump’s first administration. When Trump elevated Pompeo from CIA director to secretary of State, the president declared he had “earned the praise of members of both parties” and would “do a fantastic job.”
Pompeo briefly considered running for president in 2024, criticized Trump for mishandling classified documents and “staring into the rearview mirror, claiming victimhood,” and promised voters “solutions, not tweets.” He still went on to endorse the former president and called Trump “a great guy” on the eve of the 2024 election.
Iran has vowed retaliation against Pompeo for helping plan the assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. Informed that Trump had revoked security details for members of his administration, a CIA officer predicted that “somebody is going to get killed.” Pompeo explained the order as “a reflection of Trump’s character or lack thereof.”
Anthony Fauci was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022. President Bush awarded him the National Medal of Freedom in 2007 as the architect of the President’s Emerging Plan For AIDS Relief, which saved millions of lives by distributing drugs in Africa.
As a member of the Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force, Fauci was initially praised by Trump, who said, “He has become a major television star for all the right reasons.” But, while declaring that Trump’s briefings were “helpful,” Fauci corrected misstatements about, for example, the likelihood of COVID-19 disappearing with the onset of warmer weather, the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and a claim that 99 percent of cases were harmless.
As Trump Republicans and libertarians condemned mask mandates and lockdowns of public buildings, Trump asserted that “people are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.” Before the end of Trump’s term, Fauci had become the administration official whom COVID critics loved to hate.
In 2022, a West Virginia man was sentenced to three years in prison for threatening to drag Fauci, his wife and children into the street, beat them to death and set them on fire. Since then, the threats have kept on coming.
Trump appointed Gen. Mark Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019. A year later, Milley apologized for inserting himself into domestic politics by accompanying Trump as he walked through Lafayette Square, ostensibly to clear racial justice protestors, in what turned out to be a photo op.
At his retirement ceremony, Milley declared that he had taken an oath to the Constitution, not “to a king, or a queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”
Trump has said that Milley committed treason and deserves the death penalty for supposedly going behind his back in dealing with Chinese officials at the end of his administration. And like Bolton and Pompeo, Milley has been threatened with death by Iran for his role in the killing of Soleimani.
Trump has often compared himself to Abraham Lincoln. But he clearly has not yet signed on to the 16th president’s call for “malice toward none” nor for “charity for all,” let alone tried “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
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