We begin today’s roundup with USA Today’s editorial on Donald Trump’s threats to revoke security clearances of those he dislikes:
While Brennan will survive just fine without a security clearance, stripping one from federal officials in sensitive jobs kills their effectiveness. Trump said Friday that he would likely pull the security clearance of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, who played a modest role in the Russian probe during its early days.
Who's next to lose his clearance? Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who supervises the Mueller investigation? Mueller himself?
Thankfully, steps are already being taken to curtail Trump's authority, beyond the bipartisan outcry from former intelligence officials.
The Democratic vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, is threatening legislation to block the president from punishing or intimidating critics by revoking their security clearances.
Adam Entous at The New Yorker highlights just how far Trump wants to go in his unprecedented tactic of revoking clearances for purely personal reasons:
At the time, some of Trump’s most fervent supporters in the White House saw former Obama Administration officials as powerful enemies who threatened the new President’s rule, and they agitated for punishing them by revoking their security clearances. The idea was rebuffed by the national-security adviser at the time, H. R. McMaster, who signed a memo extending the clearances of his predecessors at the N.S.C., Republicans and Democrats alike. As Trump stepped up his public and private attacks on Obama, some of the new President’s advisers thought that he should take the extraordinary step of denying Obama himself access to intelligence briefings that were made available to all of his living predecessors. Trump was told about the importance of keeping former Presidents, who frequently met with foreign leaders, informed. In the end, Trump decided not to exclude Obama, at the urging of McMaster.
Damon Linker writes about Trumpism:
That can be difficult to recognize and accept. Because the lies, corruption, graft, racism, xenophobia, hucksterism, and demagoguery of President Trump and leading members of his administration are so brazen and diverge so sharply from the political norms of the recent American past, it's easy to lapse into misplaced hope that the pathologies swirling around us will dissipate as soon as the man leaves office.
But that is naïve. Whether Trump departs by way of impeachment (don't bet on it), after an electoral loss in November 2020, or on January 20, 2025, after finishing out two full terms, our political reality is unlikely to return to anything like what it was before he rose to office in the first place.
That's because, while Trump is a hugely significant catalyst of the political transformations going on around us, he is also a symptom of deeper changes in our political culture, which he's merely exploiting to further his own ambitions.
On a final note, Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post dedicates his column to the Trump administration’s aversion to the truth:
Trump’s acid-tongued Twitter feed and his public remarks are gushers of lies, falsehoods and exaggerations. As of Aug. 1, The Post’s indefatigable Fact Checker column had counted a staggering 4,229 false or misleading claims by the president since he took office.
How can this not have a corrosive effect on our democracy? We are accustomed to politicians who shade the truth and spin the facts, but now we have a president who ignores unpleasant truth and rejects unflattering facts. Whether this is a diabolical plan to delegitimize critics or a reflection of Trump’s narcissism, the damage is the same. As a society we become less able to believe, less able to trust.
Truth is truth — and worth fighting for.