Matt Ford and Adam Sewer at The Atlantic recap Donald Trump’s extraordinary dismissal of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates:
In an extraordinarily personal statement announcing the dismissal, the White House said Yates had “betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States” and denounced her as “an Obama administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.” [...] By placing the Justice Department in direct defiance of the president, albeit perhaps only briefly, Yates’s decision evoked parallels to other major clashes between the White House and the government’s lawyers. Perhaps the most infamous incident was the Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, when President Richard Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and forced the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus.
“Now that’s she’s been fired, it does resemble it even more,” said David Greenberg, a Rutgers University history professor. “There’s still differences: She was a civil servant who was filling in because Trump’s appointee hadn’t been confirmed.
“But I think it also needs to be weighed against the fact we’re only 10 days into Trump’s presidency and we already have this kind of behavior,” Greenberg said. “It suggests the same kind of out-of-control need to assert power that Nixon showed and that Trump has always showed, but that I think he’s demonstrated more vividly than ever with this.”
Chris Strohm and Steven Daniels at Bloomberg:
President Donald Trump’s decision to fire the acting attorney general has Democrats vowing an all-out fight against the nomination of the person he wants for the post -- Republican Senator Jeff Sessions.
The partisan anger fueled by Trump’s decision all but guarantees a titanic battle for an even bigger job, Supreme Court justice, when Trump announces his pick Tuesday.
Senate Republicans likely can clear Sessions, a fellow senator for Alabama, with a final vote as early as Friday, if they turn quickly to address his confirmation. But Democrats say they want more time to question him, particularly over whether he’d have the independence to stand up to Trump if he disagreed with the president. Democrats say that’s what acting Attorney General Sally Yates did, and it cost her her job.
This is on the heels of yesterday’s news that the Trump administration advises State Department officials quit if they don’t agree with Trump:
The White House on Monday warned State Department officials that they should leave their jobs if they did not agree with President Trump’s agenda, an extraordinary effort to stamp out a wave of internal dissent against Mr. Trump’s temporary ban on entry visas for people from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
Career officials at the State Department are circulating a so-called dissent cable, which says that Mr. Trump’s executive order closing the nation’s doors to more than 200 million people with the intention of weeding out a handful of would-be terrorists will not make the nation safer, and might instead deepen the threat.
“These career bureaucrats have a problem with it?” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, told reporters. “They should either get with the program or they can go.”
Meanwhile, The New York Times writes about “President Bannon”:
Plenty of presidents have had prominent political advisers, and some of those advisers have been suspected of quietly setting policy behind the scenes (recall Karl Rove or, if your memory stretches back far enough, Dick Morris). But we’ve never witnessed a political aide move as brazenly to consolidate power as Stephen Bannon — nor have we seen one do quite so much damage so quickly to his putative boss’s popular standing or pretenses of competence. [...]
Presidents are entitled to pick their advisers. But Mr. Trump’s first spasms of policy making have supplied ample evidence that he needs advisers who can think strategically and weigh second- and third-order consequences beyond the immediate domestic political effects. Imagine tomorrow if Mr. Trump is faced with a crisis involving China in the South China Sea or Russia in Ukraine. Will he look to his chief political provocateur, Mr. Bannon, with his penchant for blowing things up, or will he turn at last for counsel to the few more thoughtful experienced hands in his administration, like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and General Dunford?
The Financial Times calls for Trump’s visit to Britain to be off the table as long as Trump’s discriminatory order stays in place:
Anyone concluding that the executive order is consistent with America’s best values, or those of liberal democracy more generally, is unlikely to modify their view on the basis of an indignant editorial. The order speaks plainly and leaves those who read it to make a plain judgment. This newspaper can only point out that the US has long been the world’s strongest voice for freedom of conscience and human dignity, and note, with alarm and sorrow, that Mr Trump has departed violently from that tradition. [...] No leader outside of the administration can justify responding with silence. Talk of President Trump making a state visit to Britain should be off the table while the order remains in place. Chief executives, who have been compliant as the president has bullied them about their global operations, should speak up. Their voices should count with a president focused on the economy. Most importantly, the world waits to see how much the Republican Congress is prepared to take before it puts principle ahead of party.
Dana Milbank on the “take Trump seriously, not literally” Republicans:
Oh, so now they’re worried? Many of these donors, like Republicans in Congress, chose not to take Trump literally during the campaign, looking away when presented with repeated warning signs. Now they have a serious problem — as do we all.
Juan Cole looks at the effect of the Muslim ban on our safety:
Muslim radicals such as ISIL have long sought to polarize the world between militant imperialist Westerners and militant Muslims, and have been frustrated by how few of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims have been interested in joining their radical, violent struggle. They call the overlap between peoples with a Christian heritage and those with a Muslim one the “gray zone,” and brutal if ephemeral terrorist attacks like those launched in Paris and Brussels last year are intended to reduce the size of that zone. They are hoping to get Christians to set upon Muslims and drive the latter into the arms of the radicals. Trump just damaged the US alliance with ISIL’s enemies and handed ISIL a huge propaganda victory. So that is how his executive order on immigration affects national security.
In case you missed it, David Frum’s “How to Build an Autocracy” is getting lots of attention:
A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.
Ryan Cooper on Trump as a destructive force:
[F]our sitting members of Congress from the D.C. suburbs went to the Dulles airport to demand that airport cops grant access to the people being detained, in keeping with the court order. But the airport authority's deputy police chief refused.
Here's what this means: Donald Trump's executive branch is defying the judiciary, even with the personal, in-person assistance of national legislators. He is attempting, in part at least, to overturn constitutional government in the United States.
This is not an exaggeration. In a republic, a professional legal corps gets to interpret the law as written by the elected representatives of the people, and the agents of state violence must obey their commands. In a tyranny, the leader does whatever he wants. That is what Trump, with the close counsel of his advisers Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, is trying to create.
On a final note, Jonathan Alter argues that Trump is acting in a matter inconsistent with American values:
The most striking thing about President Trump’s first 10 days in office is that the ardent nationalist who pledged to put “America first” is emerging as the least American president of the United States.
By least American, I mean least connected to the larger democratic values that define the country.
Our national identity is unique in the world because it’s based not on race, religion, or country of origin, but on ideals that transcend party. Such ideals are at odds with a president who lies promiscuously, destabilizes the government with impulsive, discriminatory, and inhumane policies backed up with jarring firings, and cannot allow his White House to apologize or admir error under any circumstances, even for neglecting to mention Jews in a Holocaust commemoration. Those are the telltale signs of a foreign dictator, not an American leader.