Saturday Night Massacre

 Trump is doubling down this week on his attempts to purge the federal workforce of nonpolitical civil servants and anyone else who doesn't embrace his personality cult. Obviously, the whole effort is disturbing. But I think the move that stands out above the rest as even more chilling than the others is his decision to revoke federal Secret Service protection for John Bolton and other former officials who are facing credible death threats from malign actors. 

This move strikes me as the creepiest of all, because it is Trump's first flirtation with outright violence against people whom he sees as dissidents. His various other moves to force out civil servants take aim at people's livelihoods, to be sure. But this is the first move he has made that seems to strike at people's lives. That is the aspect of the decision that makes it less Nixonian Saturday Night Massacre—and more Hitlerian Night of the Long Knives. 

Of course, Trump has not yet pulled the full-Putin and ordered the outright assassination of his perceived enemies. Instead, he seems to be applying the ethic of the "Latest Decalogue" (to quote Arthur Hugh Clough's poem of that title—a satirical parody of self-serving bourgeois ethics): "Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive/ Officiously, to keep alive." Trump, that is to say, isn't going to kill Bolton, Fauci, and Pompeo himself—but he won't lift a finger to save them either. 

And why exactly does Trump now apparently loathe Mike Pompeo—his own former Secretary of State—so much that he professedly will feel no guilt if the Iranians now kill him in a targeted assassination? The story is troubling in its own right. Pompeo, after all, has not been in any way an overt Trump critic. People treated him as a very plausible contender for an appointment in a second Trump administration—until Trump went out of his way to rule this possibility out. 

Why did he turn on him so suddenly? The Wall Street Journal reported about a month ago that Tucker Carlson apparently torpedoed the nomination personally. He went to Trump and said that Pompeo had to be taken out of the running for a post on Trump's team, because he was a "war-monger" who had allegedly conspired to assassinate Julian Assange back when the latter was still living in the Ecuadorian embassy. (Pompeo denies these allegations, and they have not been otherwise substantiated.)

Now, I'm cheered by anyone opposing targeted assassinations of U.S. critics abroad (though, again, there is no outside evidence to support Tucker's allegations here). But Tucker is not someone who demonstrates any broader concern in general about human rights. So why does he care so much specifically about Julian Assange? 

Once again—the only through-line here seems to be an eerie affinity on the part of several key MAGA figures with the authoritarian adversaries of the United States—a creepy alignment, more specifically, with the foreign policy of Putin and Iran. 

Wait a minute—you may be saying—MAGA aligned with Iran? It's not as far-fetched as you think. To be sure, the Iranians may have conspired to prevent Trump's re-election. And Trump may still be perceived in some quarters as aligned with the Israeli far-right, to which Iran is the ultimate enemy. But some important players in the MAGA universe—most notably Tucker—have made it clear that they do not support Israel, and indeed seem to have pushed some pro-Iran talking points. 

It was not lost on Israelis, for instance, that Tucker pointedly remained seated during the Inauguration, when the rest of the room stood to applaud the release of Israeli hostages. 

In this context, it is more than a little ominous that Trump has not only broken with Mike Pompeo publicly—but that he has decided to revoke his protective detail, in the midst of credible threats against the latter's life from specifically Iranian assassins. 

Here—as in Trump's admiration for Putin, his sabotage of Ukrainian military aid, his professed indifference to the fate of Taiwan, and his sudden volte-face on the TikTok ban—it's hard to escape the impression that this administration does not have our country's best interests at heart. Quite to the contrary, they seem dead-set on serving the bidding of our authoritarian foes. As Robert Burns would say: We're bought and sold—Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!