Trump’s priorities are profoundly misplaced at a time when the public is losing patience with his administration’s failure to rein in consumer costs.
If you’ve been reading or watching Andy McCarthy’s coverage of the Trump administration’s efforts to secure criminal convictions against Trump critics James Comey and Letitia James, you’re probably not surprised by the dismissal (albeit “without prejudice”) of their respective cases.
As Andy has also been careful to note, this is not the end of the story. Statute allows the government to try again, and it surely will. But this saga illustrates why the president’s retribution tour was an ill-conceived project in the first place.
The slapdash effort to charge the president’s tormentors with something prosecutable, irrespective of the ethics of the endeavor, was probably destined to end in failure when Trump’s U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia resigned in protest. Perhaps the government can salvage the cases against Comey and James, but the provenance of the investigations into them likely scuttles that prospect. In a missive directed at his attorney general and subsequently (and inexplicably) published, Trump himself admitted that what’s on the line here isn’t the rule of law but his administration’s “reputation and credibility” for making good on its threats.
Now, the U.S. Navy appears set on making another example of one of Trump’s critics. It will go about as well as the president’s attempt to turn the tables on James and Comey.
According to the Pentagon, U.S. Senator Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) allegedly engaged in “misconduct” when he and some of his fellow Democrats appeared in a video warning uniformed service personnel that they would face consequences for blindly following illegal presidential orders. The military is looking into the prospect of calling Kelly out of retirement only to pursue “court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.”
The video in question was not aimed at members of the military, as Republicans have insisted with theatrical passion amid their claim that the video somehow advocates insurrectionary sedition. Uniformed personnel don’t need to be reminded that they may be prosecuted if they violate the law, even on orders from above. The only Americans who are salivating for that sort of content are the Resistance types who require constant reinforcement of their deluded belief that fascism has descended on the United States.
It was a thoughtless and cynical effort to cultivate anxiety among the Democratic Party’s base voters. Indeed, its participants have made themselves look like fools in the days since as they’ve struggled to articulate why they cut the video in the first place.
And yet, the president’s scene-chewingly overwrought reaction to the video — a reaction encouraged by the game of one-upmanship that aspiring MAGA influencers play in the effort to posture as even more offended on Trump’s behalf — lends credence to the Resistance’s fantasies. The Pentagon’s intervention on Trump’s behalf surely does the same. The “seditious six,” as Secretary Pete Hegseth called the lawmakers who appeared in that video, deserved to be mocked. It’s not hard to envision how Trump might have made Kelly into a laughingstock. Instead, he’s making him into a martyr.
If this is the sort of “retribution” the president previewed on the campaign trail last year, it’s not going to deter his critics. Worse, it indicates to persuadable voters that Trump’s priorities are profoundly misplaced at a time when the public is losing patience with his administration’s failure to rein in consumer costs. And so far, the revenge tour has produced no scalps of objective consequence.
The whole enterprise has been a costly waste of time.