Trump’s penchant for firing his loyalists defines his movement
Royalist and anti-revolutionary journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan, writing in 1793 about the French Revolution, coined a phrase that resounds today: “A l’exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants,” which translates to “Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children.”
We see this in Washington, where Donald J. Trump has been ruthless in metaphorically beheading acolytes.
So far, he has bounced three Cabinet members: Attorney General Pam Bondi, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Lower-level career fatalities include Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino; Corey Lewandowski, an unpaid special staffer at the Department of Homeland Security, and Navy Secretary John Phelan.
More recently, Dr. Marty Makary quit as head of the Food and Drug Administration amid rumors that Trump was planning to can him. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urged him to jump beforehand, it appears.
And Trump has pulled out all the stops — including a Justice Department probe — in trying to oust Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell from the Fed board. Powell, whom Trump had appointed during his first term, will be succeeded by Kevin Warsh at the Fed’s helm, but he intends to stay on the Fed board for a couple years yet.
In his first term, Trump loved to wield his guillotine. Casualties included FBI Director James Comey, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, National Security Adviser John Bolton and White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci – all of whom went on to disparage Trump (and some still do so).
Of course, such highly visible executions are nothing compared to over 200,000 firings of federal employees thanks to sometimes-Trump ally Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Makary’s FDA was gutted by the voluntary departures of some 4,000 staffers, apparently out of distaste with the agency’s tumult and redirection under Kennedy and Makary.
In a sorry twist, at least some federal employees who got the ax were very surprised Trumpists.
An attorney advisor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, said he was “devastated” after voting for Trump and being assured that his job was safe. As CNN reported, he had moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, with his pregnant wife and toddler for the position. He said, “I was expecting to spend the rest of my life doing it.”
Some felt blindsided.
“I was thinking that there would be changes,” a two-time Trump voter and Department of Agriculture researcher told The Los Angeles Times. “But instead of being focused, this is just going completely off the rails, chopping and slicing up parts of the government that are protecting Americans.”
So much for loyalty. Trump, of course, is notorious for expecting it but rarely returning it.
Even more intriguing, though, is when voters are involved and believe that Trump backers aren’t Trumpy enough. That was the case in the May 12 primary defeat of two-term Nebraska Secretary of State Robert Evnen.
Evnen lost to Omaha businessman Scott Petersen, who challenged the integrity of Nebraska’s electoral system on the Lincoln resident’s watch. The incumbent tried to tie himself to Trump’s national election overhaul efforts, but wound up defending the state’s voting systems – something that apparently doesn’t suit the Trump narrative that many in the state’s GOP seem to buy.
“People don’t trust election systems … and whether right or wrong, it’s a problem,” Petersen told the Nebraska Examiner. “It needs to be addressed.”
Petersen targeted Evnen’s handling of vote counting, the news outlet reported. He questioned whether the ballot-counting machines can access the internet and be hacked, argued that voting by mail should be restricted to only special circumstances and promised to conduct full hand counts of races.
Like other secretaries of state, Evnen regularly audited election results, the news outlet reported. But, by raising the specter of taints — in Trump-like fashion —Petersen undermined the incumbent.
That was so even as Evnen in the past year has tried to tie himself even more tightly to Trump. He handed over data the Trump administration requested to the U.S. Department of Justice that his Republican predecessor didn’t, including parts that critics say are potentially sensitive, according to the Examiner. He also started echoing some of Trump’s concerns over elections.
Evnen had supported a state constitutional amendment in 2022 requiring voter ID, and said he’d like such systems rolled out nationally. He pressed for more efforts to ensure noncitizens aren’t voting – a Trump hobbyhorse, but a nonproblem, according to outfits such as the Brennan Center at NYU. In desperate-seeming emails in recent weeks, Evnen pleaded for votes by arguing that he and Trump were “completely in-sync” on mail-in voting, something Trump has labeled “mail-in cheating.”
But Petersen apparently put Evnen on his back foot with suggestions of flaws in the system, despite providing no evidence. As the Examiner reported, Evnen was cast onto the defensive, describing Nebraska’s elections system as the “gold standard.” And he conducted a “transparency tour” across several counties describing the accuracy testing of Nebraska’s ballot-counting machines.
With a GOP rank and file that has been convinced by Trump and his backers that voting systems nationwide are rigged, such rational approaches are nonstarters, it seems. With people conditioned to be suspicious, those dogs just don’t hunt.
Never mind that Petersen’s approach earned him the title of “President of the TinFoil Hat Club” from outgoing U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, one of many GOP establishment figures to back Evnen. The Lincoln resident had a laundry list of endorsements from Republican elected officials, including Gov. Jim Pillen, Sens. Deb Fischer and Pete Ricketts, and all three of the state’s House lawmakers.
Evnen had long paid his dues to the state GOP by serving such figures in one way or another. But Petersen prevailed by out-Trumping him.
In the end, the revolution that Evnen backed devoured him, much as it has gobbled up so many in Washington. And, with 2 ½ years remaining for Trump’s tenure in Washington, still more are likely to fall prey to it.
While some of Trump’s followers paint in him in messianic imagery, perhaps it is Saturn he resembles more.