Donald Trump doubles down on vengeance

| 3:15 pm EDT July 24, 2018
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Donald Trump likes to rant about the media as the enemy, but Trump’s enemy is not the press, it is freedom of the press. Just as Trump’s enemy is not speech, but freedom of speech. Trump does not want to do away with media, he just wants to have complete control over it. In other words, he wants a totalitarian like grip on the narrative, regardless of truth. It also means he wants to manipulate our perceptions of him.

Trump only knows how to rule with absolute power, and his father’s wealth allowed him to play out this delusion, as evidenced by his own little failed kingdoms. He does not know how to share, compromise or cooperate. Diplomacy? What’s that? His best skills are ordering around his underlings and purposefully surrounding himself with sycophants, the type who can hold down their lunches.

Yesterday Trump threatened our First Amendment, the one that protects freedom of speech. He did so by announcing an investigation into how to revoke the security clearance of five former intelligence officers who served in the Obama Administration. He wants to revoke their clearance, he says, because they are politicizing institutions that aren’t supposed to be politicized, and he accused some of profiting off their security clearance, although there is no evidence of this so far.

Trump also said that they are making “extremely inappropriate” comments about Trump and Russia that are baseless. So basically, he accused them of everything he has been doing himself. Some of these former officers still receive intelligence briefings, which is in the best interest of our national security. However, they are still allowed free speech. They can have all the opinions they want, they just can’t speak about classified materials, and there is no evidence they violated those rules.

Donald Trump does have a real reason to not want these former officials to have security clearance. It is not a far leap to imagine that Trump only wants his own handpicked personnel to have access to current and future intelligence. He objects to their access, not because they are too partisan to be effective as advisors, but because he wants to do bad things and not have anyone on the “outside” see him.