The Truth is a National, ie. Personal, Security Threat; or, King Henry With Fewer Wives

The Trump regime paused briefly from its efforts to immiserate the American people wholesale and decided to go retail for a bit, returning to one of Donald Trump's chief regime policies: revenge. Several executive actions today are of particular note. One is an executive order and the others are memoranda to the heads of departments and agencies--although all of them are, in effect, part of the Trumpian taste for executive orders of attainder. 

One involves an executive order against the law firm Susman Godfrey. It's what we have come to know as standard-issue regime pettiness, although surely not petty to the law firm or to lawyers and decent citizens. Susman Godfrey's chief sin, first on the list in the executive order? The regime's lawyers--one imagines a couple still work there--put it in fancier language, but not so fancy as to obscure it. Susman Godfrey represented Dominion Voting Systems, which sued Fox News for defamation and received a settlement moments before trial, perhaps because Fox News in fact defamed Dominion Voting Systems. It is not clear in itself how much Trump's anger has to do with the crime of suing-the-media-while-not-being-Donald-Trump and how much it has to do with Dominion having had the temerity to interfere with the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.   

Two other orders are similarly grudge-driven. One is aimed at Miles Taylor, who Trump accuses of "disclosing sensitive information"--although not this sensitive information, which is fine. (Remember: "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.") While I am normally and rightly queasy about a White House going after leakers, I certainly do not think doing so is per se illegitimate. Calling Taylor a traitor and ordering our cosplaying fool of a Homeland Security secretary to investigate him, however, is another matter. (Kristi Noem's recent social-media pictures put me in mind of other, similar photographs.) Of course Trump's interest is not in national security, but in getting even. 

Finally, and right in between the two, is his memo targeting Chris Krebs, who had the misfortune to take his oath and his office seriously while serving as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during Trump's first term. As with Susman and Dominion Voting Systems, Krebs's greatest crime was insisting on the truth--or, as the presidential memorandum puts it, he "falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen." Perhaps that answers the question: Susman Godfrey's crime was not suing Fox, but doing so on the basis that claims of a rigged election were false. 

The election, of course, was not stolen. I find something especially offensive to anything like common decency, a stench in the nostrils, to see an official memorandum targeting an individual who did his duty and basing that vendetta on a blatantly false proposition, one that in the mind of this president and his lieutenants occupies the status of the propositions in the Oath of Succession in 1534. As the quote goes, "If [the Earth] is flat, will the King's command make it round? And if it is round, will the King's command flatten it?" No. But it can, in an administration run by a "King" whose councillors make us weep with longing for the intelligence and relative moral restraint of a mere Cromwell, lead to a presidential order charging Noem and the Attorney General to investigate Krebs and provide "recommendations for appropriate remedial or preventative actions." Or, as the quote goes, "My dear Norfolk....This isn't Spain."

I find "lawfare" a fatuous term, no matter which political side is using it. Still, insofar as it hangs like a moral millstone around the neck of its boss, sinking him ever deeper into the muck, I think we can all agree: "Lawfare continues to hobble the Trump administration."