The Trump Administration, Love It or Leave It

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/opinion/the-trump-administration-love-it-or-leave-it.html

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It took George W. Bush only a few days after the Supreme Court ended the Florida recount and made him president in 2000 to sum up the essential challenge of being in charge of a democratic government: People have a pesky habit of questioning orders.

“If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier,” Bush said on Dec. 18, 2000, after Democrats in Congress told him they expected at least some effort at compromise. “Just so long,” he added, “as I am the dictator.”

Bush was not entirely joking, as the country later discovered when he began ordering things like warrantless wiretapping, illegal detentions, torture and the invasion of Iraq — and seeking to silence or get rid of anyone who stood in his way.

In March 2004, the Bush White House tried to compel a hospitalized and barely conscious Attorney General John Ashcroft to overrule his own lawyers and declare the Bush wiretapping program legal. Led by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Bush team packed the Justice Department with ideologues who were willing to invent justifications for the use of torture. And in December 2006, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired seven United States attorneys who refused to block investigations of Republican officeholders or prosecute phony voter fraud cases.

Now comes President Trump, who in the last few days issued a clearly illegal order to screen refugees and immigrants based on their religion (Islam, of course), fired the acting attorney general for saying she would not defend the order against court challenges and told career diplomats who objected to the ban to remain silent.

We have all seen what can happen when you quash dissent on matters of national security — you end up with falsified intelligence reports that mislead the nation into a foolishly planned and ineptly conducted invasion of Iraq.

Trump had the power to fire the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, who had stayed on at Trump’s request to run the Justice Department until a permanent attorney general could be confirmed. She refused to instruct her staff to defend Trump’s immigration ban in court, which was an act of open defiance — sort of like the attorney general and his deputy refusing to obey Richard Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor in 1973.

Perhaps Yates should have resigned, as those two Nixon appointees did, rather than publicly defying the president and presumably waiting to be fired. But the result is the same. Trump found someone, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Dana J. Boente, willing to defend the immigration ban in exchange for being named acting attorney general.

In Washington, you can always find someone willing to play along, as Solicitor General Robert Bork obligingly did for Nixon in 1973. But the result is a serious erosion of the integrity of government — a price that comes especially high when we are talking about the Justice Department, which is supposed to place the Constitution and the law above partisan politics.

Even before Trump fired Yates over the visa ban, his White House was busily trying to silence those in the government who were as appalled by his order as most of the rest of the world was.

More than 100 career diplomats were prepared to sign a document indicating their strong opposition to the move against Muslim immigrants and refugees. The memorandum was being circulated through a State Department channel created during the Vietnam War specifically for the purpose of airing dissenting views about policy questions, just as 51 diplomats signed a similar document last summer protesting President Obama’s policies on Syria.

Trump wasted no time making it clear he would not tolerate that sort of thing. He sent his press secretary, Sean Spicer, out to deliver a warning to the diplomats who disagree with his immigration policies.

“The president has a very clear vision,” Spicer said. He added: “If somebody has a problem with that agenda, that does call into question whether or not they should continue in that post.”

Spicer didn’t exactly threaten to fire the diplomats, which would be illegal, but the message was clear. Trump doesn’t want to hear from dissenters about his immigration policies, or anything else, just as Bush and Cheney didn’t want to anyone to brook any opposition on torture, detention, wiretapping or Iraq.