Yeah, this isn’t at all creepy.
Rep. Steve King (R-Crazy) has been pushing Trump to start purging the government along political lines for a while. Here’s a recent tweet:
@RealDonaldTrump needs to purge Leftists from executive branch before disloyal, illegal & treasonist acts sink us. https://t.co/o1DYtgA7aL
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 6, 2017
(This tweet is pretty typical for King, who’s been the House voice of racist crazy for years now.)
We already know Trump values loyalty over competence. After the TrumpRyanCare fiasco, Trump hinted darkly about remembering who had been loyal to Trump, and off the record, he threatened representatives who he felt had shown insufficient personal reverence with political mayhem.
There are thousands of federal employees who Trump is supposed to be nominating, but isn’t. He already has a lot of power to shape the federal executive to do what he wants.
Nonetheless, he hasn’t nominated people for more than a few of these positions, and I worry for the career employees. Most federal employees are just public servants who work for a living. They’re not political, and shouldn’t be. The executive branch isn’t supposed to demand individual loyalty as a condition of employment.
I’d expect Trump to use his power to put people who he wanted in critical positions, but unsurprisingly, he hasn’t. Trump’s struggles delegating authority are well-known, even when it hurts him. I expect him to either slowly nominate people, or not nominate them at all.
But I can see Trump, and now Kushner, using this new office to implement a de facto loyalty test under the excuse of ‘efficiency’. They could easily purge anybody showing dissent. I expect the efficiency of most offices will suffer after the first few open minds get sacked.
Aside: My first draft included the purportedly Japanese phrase: “It’s the raised nail that’s struck flat.” I’ve used the phrase for years, but when I finally looked it up, I found that I had it wrong. 出る杭は打たれる (deru kui wa utareru) translates to “the stake that sticks out gets hammered down,” more of a ‘post and beam’ metaphor. It’s an interesting phrase. Stakes are never hammered flat — they support things by sticking out — but they can push out too far, so the ‘stake’ idea takes on overtones of power and overreach. It’s not the expression of conformity I’d been repeating all this time.
