PRESIDENT TRUMP SAYS: "HE IS ALL THAT MATTERS"

…The man that that thinks he’s King of America

The experiment called “America” may not survive this presidency

You may recall that 2 years ago, Fox News asked the president about some critical vacancies in the State Department.  What was happening was that basically the president didn’t believe the state department was even needed.  In fact, the answer that Trump gave Fox was very blunt.  The president stated to Fox: "In America, I’m the only one that matters.”

Since that statement, there has continued to be a mass exodus of state department personnel, including that the State Department is now on its 2^nd Secretary, and that individual seems to totally support the non-presidential actions of the president.

In the dozens of hours of the presidential impeachment inquiry, it doesn’t mean that Trump has decided to adapt to what he should be doing as the custodian of the US Constitution.  He has instead turned the US Government into his version of his Trump businesses operation, and it is as full of wheeler-dealers inside and outside the official positions in Washington.  The individuals seem to exist only to do Trump's political bidding.  In his version of Washington, his rogue actors are the real players in town.  The traditional professionals in the National Security Council, the State Department and the Pentagon have become virtually irrelevant.

Former National Security Council Russia adviser Fiona Hill testified on the fifth day of impeachment hearings against President Trump.  Ms. Hill was Trump’s top adviser on Russia and Europe for the last 3 years, and she watched the earlier impeachment hearings as she had prepared for her public testimony.

Hill had labored in the White House for those years, but said she hadn’t fully grasped how the Trump administration actually operated until she watched Gordon Sondland, a Trump million-dollar donor supposedly turned into a diplomat, as he testified before Congress.

In the White House, Hill had seen Sondland as an impulsive individual overseeing an off-the-books campaign to pressure Ukraine to open investigations that would be politically beneficial to Trump.

Sondland’s testimony showed as Hill watched, and it finally dawned on her that Sondland was running his totally different and illegal policy that had nothing to do with traditional diplomacy of foreign affairs.  It was obvious that he wasn’t including her in his efforts and he was working only for the president toward a very different and inappropriate goal.

“I realized that I wasn’t really being fair to Ambassador Sondland,” she testified. “He was carrying out what he thought he had been instructed to carry out.”

She realized that he was the true actor; and she had become the outlier.

It really became a show stopper when under oath, Sondland acknowledged the ‘quid pro quo’ or basic bribery that Trump was trying to do against the new president of Ukraine.  And all of what Trump was asking was just for his personal issues, not for the benefit of Ukraine or the United States.

Hill’s realization, which she then shared with the lawmakers, drew a strong response from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who, like Trump, had come to view the nation’s civil servants as un-elected, disgusting bureaucrats whose actual real efforts were working only to thwart the president’s will and his illegal activities

The president, Nunes had stated, had turned to Sondland because the experts in his government had dismissed, as a conspiracy theory, his real concerns about Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election.  Of course, it is well known that Trump supports that the Ukrainians were the ones that interfered in the 2016 elections because that’s what Putin told Trump.  The US intelligence officials have confirmed that it was Russia, not Ukraine, but Trump poo poos his own intelligence operations.  The US has the most sophisticated intelligence operation in the world, but Trump would prefer to believe his own Russian adversary, Vladimir Putin.

“I understand that people at the NSC and people at the State Department had issues with that,” Nunes said. “But at the end of the day, isn’t it the commander in chief who makes those decisions?” So apparently Rep Nunes thinks the president should believe Putin?   Hill replied that she’d been given a directive by her boss to stay out of all the Ukraine’s domestic politics.  But Trump illegally wants Ukraine to help with his 2020 re-election campaign.

This latest exchange revealed the intense pressure that Trump’s style of governing has put on US institutions and civil servants struggling to make policy across the federal government.  From the moment he took office, Trump has shown little interest in working with the traditional levers of state, which he views as slow, cumbersome and untrustworthy.  While most of the true civil servants consider Trump as being dishonest, and totally untrustworthy.

Trump’s national security advisers have struggled hard and have largely failed to adapt to his unusual approach to what he calls “governing”.  Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who was fired by Trump in 2018, he did try to leverage foreign policy bureaucracy’s expertise on behalf of a president with virtually no national security experience.

McMaster convened frequent meetings of government experts from the CIA, State Department and Pentagon that Trump had little time for, and he drafted detailed decision memos that Trump never even bothered to read.

After a year, Trump finally concluded McMaster’s approach to foreign policy was inefficient and prone to producing embarrassing leaks.  (Basically, Trump makes all the decisions without the info for making the appropriate decision.  Leaks of the truth as to how unprofessional and ignorant the president is continue to be made about how he knows nothing about the US government and real governing.)

John Bolton, McMaster’s successor as National Security Adviser, he stopped the briefings by specialists in favor of informal one-on-one meetings with Trump.  Foreign policy experts still put in long hours at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, but they rarely make the short walk to the Oval Office.

In her testimony, Hill revealed that Trump had not only never met the top Ukraine expert on his staff, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, but that the president also had been led to believe that Kash Patel, a former Republican staffer working in the White House, was filling that important role.

Hill became aware of the misunderstanding only when she learned that Patel, who has absolutely no Ukraine expertise, and had been feeding Trump untruthful documents on the Ukraine.  She then warned her staff to be “very careful” about communications with Patel, and she tried, with little or no success, to learn what Patel had actually been handing the president.  However, Patel's misinformation did turn Trump against Ukraine and its supposed corruption.

This week, Trump’s fourth national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, promised to bring back some of the bureaucratic structure that had disappeared under John Bolton. He said he would re-institute regular meetings of top officials, including the president’s national security cabinet.  But the way Trump dismisses most government personnel, it will probably go nowhere.

It’s hard to believe, but O’Brien also defended Trump’s use of nontraditional and nongovernmental envoys, and he even likened Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, to Harry Hopkins.  Hopkins was the highly intelligent architect of the New Deal, whom Franklin D. Roosevelt had asked to serve as his chief diplomatic troubleshooter.  He was also the chief liaison to Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin during World War II.

Likening Giuliani to Harry Hopkins is like calling President Trump one of the most intelligent US presidents……NOT!

Without an appropriate process to set policy and communicate the president’s intent to diplomats around the world, Trump’s Twitter feed and his off-the-cuff pronouncements to the press have come to play an outsize role in his presidency.

In the first months of Trump’s presidency, senior officials in the Pentagon and State Department instructed subordinates to ignore the president’s tweets and work through official policy channels.  By 2019, that approach had become increasingly untenable for Marie Yovanovitch, the US Ambassador in Kyiv.  Ms. Yovanovitch was fighting off a smear campaign fomented mostly by Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Worried that the attacks were undermining her authority, Yovanovitch asked the State Department to put out an official statement of support.  But the state department failed to do that, even though Ambassador Yovanovitch was one of the most accomplished and  awarded US Ambassadors.

Without going further, the US government, with the help of anti-government TV coverage such as Fox News, has been in support of President Trump's efforts.  

At least with the three original broadcast networks, you got the real information as to what was the political reality, but that’s not the case today.  With all the social media and out-side nations like Russia's interference and Fox News, you have many Americans that are making their political decisions without having “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. 

The whole basis of the US Constitution and the country having a real “free press”, it was to make sure that the average American would have the real information to make appropriate political decisions based on the truth.  Today with Fox News, social media and the on-line interference of the Russians, the American people are not getting the “real deal” in American politics.

The point is this!

No American voter should depend on any single media to give you real information.

Before, we could depend on reporters such as Walter Cronkite,Edward R. Morrow, and Huntley & Brinkley, that’s not the case today.

Yes, you can count on The New York Times, The Washington Post and Rachael Maddow and Chris Hayes for good information, but you should never stop there and NEVER depend on Fox News and Facebook for your news.

This is a new universe and the life of the country is now dependent on the public not depending on one source for its political information.

We are in a new era and it’s time to get smart and do what you need to do to be properly informed.

Get real folks…..our country depends on it......and I’m being very serious.

Copyright G. Ater 2019