Trump is not fooling this time

It is said that the adage “he who hesitates is lost” is an adaptation of a line from Joseph Addison’s 1712 play Cato. I do not believe that Donald Trump is a student of the co-founder of The Spectator, but he has clearly absorbed that nugget of practical wisdom.

Within hours of taking office on Monday, Trump issued some 200 executive orders and proclamations affecting the government’s conduct on everything from immigration to DEI, from energy policy to the 1,500 people incarcerated in Washington jails because they joined in the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  

It is one thing to issue orders and proclamations. It is another thing to see them carried out successfully. But here we are, barely fifty hours into the second Trump administration, and the activity on the ground is furious. On Tuesday, heads of all government agencies were ordered to shut down their DEI offices by 5 p.m. today, Wednesday, and place all DEI hires on paid administrative leave “immediately.” Trump is not fooling this time. The order also directs the heads and acting heads of every agency to ask employees “if they know of any efforts to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.” 

That chill in the air that you feel is not due solely to the polar vortex making the mercury plunge. The country is also in the grip of the Trump common-sense vortex. With respect to illegal immigration, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan reports that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement team made 308 arrests yesterday. Following his policy of going after the “worst first,” the people arrested were all violent criminals: murderers, rapists, gang members and the like. The total number of people apprehended crossing the southern border illegally has dropped from between 10,000 and 12,000 under Joe Biden to 766. That’s in two days. 

And then there is the so-called “intelligence community.” Do you remember the fifty-one former “intelligence experts” who signed the letter announcing that Hunter’s “laptop from hell” showed “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation?” That action gave Joe Biden the perfect talking point in his 2020 debate with Trump. But Trump was right about the laptop: it was Hunter’s, and all the damaging information was true. The letter from those wretched “experts” was a piece of political agitprop carefully organized by Antony Blinken, then Biden’s campaign manager, later, God help us, his secretary of state. Along with the full-court press of government and social media censorship, it helped get Biden over the hump of the debate and into the White House but now, like the infamous “dossier” commissioned by Hillary Clinton, it has been exposed as political propaganda.

Donald Trump remembers those fifty-one, mostly high-ranking members of “the intelligence community.”  On Monday, within hours of taking office, he suspended the security clearances of them all: former director of national intelligence James Clapper Jr., former directors of the CIA Michael Hayden, John Brennan, former secretary of defense Leon Panetta and the rest. For good measure, he also pulled security detail assigned to former national security advisor John Bolton, who then went to Jake Tapper to weep about the unfairness of it all. “This should not be a partisan matter,” Bolton said, thus underscoring the fact that Trump’s enemies, like leftists generally, think that only their political opponents, never they themselves, are partisan. And note that, if you are in the intelligence or national security biz, a security clearance if a prerequisite for your continuing to work in that space. So we’ll have at least an additional fifty-two people padding about looking for work. As a public service announcement, I note that I have heard that Applebee’s is hiring. 

Mirabile dictu, the people who spent the last eight years trying to destroy Trump are outraged, outraged that the president of the United States should take a jaundiced view of their activities. John Brennan, one of the most egregious anti-Trump fanatics, whined about the unfairness of it all to left-wing talking-head Andrea Mitchell. It was a pathetic performance, but also revelatory in a minor way. I especially liked it when Brennan described Mark Milley, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, as a “American hero.” In my view, Milley ought to have been stripped of his rank and court-martialed when he insinuated himself into the chain of command and contacted his Chinese counterpart to say that he would let him know if Trump was planning to initiate any military action against China. 

One of Joe Biden’s last acts as president was to immunize Milley against future federal prosecution by issuing a proleptic get-of-of-jail-free-card, aka a presidential pardon. Milley should be grateful for that benison, but I am not sure it will prove to be the absolution he craves. Remember, we are only two days into the new Trump administration. The shock and awe is just beginning.