-
- August 25, 2022
[ad_1]
Despite taking what might’ve otherwise been apolitical postings several years ago, Biden administration officials have increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs of Donald Trump and the right-wing media apparatus. Even as the country nears the two-year mark of Trump’s election loss, the former president has continued to successfully sic his supporters on Washington bureaucrats from afar, ginning up anger toward various agencies over actions he deems politically motivated. As of late, Trump has galvanized his base against the administrative heads he himself appointed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.
In 2017, Trump tapped Christopher Wray to lead the FBI, citing his clean reputation and knack for staying out of politics. “He is an impeccably qualified individual,” Trump said of Wray at the time, “and I know that he will again serve his country as a fierce guardian of the law and model of integrity once the Senate confirms him to lead the FBI.” Following the FBI’s recent search of Mar-a-Lago, however, those remarks might appear laughable, as Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits have gone so far as to demand that the FBI be dissolved entirely. Trump, for his part, has condemned the lawfully conducted search as a corrupt “sneak attack” and suggested that FBI agents may have planted evidence to frame him.
After Trump condemned the FBI, the agency was besieged by an “unprecedented” number of threats, as CNN reported, causing heightened security concerns for thousands of staffers. And three days after the Mar-a-Lago raid, one armed Trump supporter attempted to breach an FBI field office in Cincinnati, resulting in police killing the man after an hours-long standoff. The day of the attack, Wray assured his staff in a bureau-wide memo, seen by news outlets, that their safety was his “primary concern right now,” adding that the FBI must “maintain the trust and confidence of the American people” by refusing to take part in political debates. “Our focus must remain, as always, on our mission and on doing the right thing, in the right way, no matter how loud the noise gets.” While Trump has continued to tar the Mar-a-Lago search as a political hit job, he has directed his latest attacks specifically at the bureau’s leadership, in an apparent attempt to sow division within the agency. As Trump claimed in a recent Truth Social post, rank-and-file FBI agents actually “love” him and are “furious at FBI leadership” for ordering the search of his home. “They don’t like being ’used’ by people they do not agree with, or respect,” the former president added.
Meanwhile, the IRS, led by Trump-appointee Charles Rettig, is also facing threats stemming from a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory alleging that the agency is attempting to disenfranchise ordinary taxpayers. The claim first arose last week as Joe Biden rubber-stamped the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, allocates nearly $80 billion to the IRS over the next 10 years. Leading up to the bill’s signing, Republicans began suggesting, without evidence, that a fleet of armed IRS agents will accost average Americans door-by-door and bilk them out of their hard-earned money. “They have 80,000 employees. You know what the IRS also has? 4,600 guns. 5 million rounds of ammunition,” said House minority leader Kevin McCarthy in a floor speech earlier this month. “Why? Democrats want to double its already massive size,” he added. “With this new power, the IRS will snoop around in your bank account, your Venmo, your small business. Then the government will shake you down for every last cent.”
The IRS, for its part, has attempted to dispel such theories as the agency’s staffers have raised concerns of being attacked at their workplace, as The Washington Post reported. “In recent days, there has been an abundance of misinformation and false social media postings, some of them with threats directed at the IRS and its employees,” Rettig wrote in an internal memo, obtained by news outlets, that informed staff of plans for a “comprehensive” security review. “I’ll continue to make every effort to dispel any lingering misperceptions about our work. And I will continue to advocate for your safety in every venue where I have an audience.”
Trump’s effort to delegitimize the administrative state, which might appear to be a new phenomenon, spans back as early his own term. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of public health officials, including Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, faced a wave of threats after receiving rhetorical broadsides from Trump and conservative talking heads for promoting common sense health precautions. In an interview with Reuters this week, Fauci reflected on what it means to be a public official in such a “divisive society,” and announced that he plans to retire in December. “I don’t like the idea that I have to have armed federal agents with me,” said Fauci. “That’s not a happy feeling. It’s reality. And you’ve got to deal with reality.”
As for Trump’s rhetoric, it does not appear to be cooling down anytime soon, even as he readily acknowledges that the country is reaching a tipping point. “There is tremendous anger—like I’ve never seen before,” the former president told Fox News one week after the Mar-a-Lago search. “The temperature has to be brought down in the country. If it isn’t, terrible things are going to happen.” In what some interpreted as a veiled threat, Trump capped off his remarks by noting that the American people “are not going to stand for another scam.”
[ad_2]
Source link
.jpg){kind=small}