Round-up: Trump's crusade against the FBI. And the CIA. Plus, the move on Greenland.

Analysis of the week's events

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Trump’s crusade against the FBI

One of the themes of Trump’s regime so far has been his attempt to turn the instruments of state coercion into his own private forces. He has fired a generation of senior military leaders to install his own people in their place, and put loyalist clowns in charge of civilian agencies. Now he is going a step further: trying to reshape the deeper culture of these organizations to ensure their loyalty to him.

This is how I interpret a recent announcement that the FBI will be lowering its recruitment and training standards. Agents will no longer be required to have a college degree and will only undergo eight weeks of training rather than 18. The move comes at the same time that the regime is firing or encouraging the departure of thousands of current FBI employees. So the new, under-trained ones will be replacing old, experienced ones.

Why would Trump do this? It has to do with the politics of law enforcement, and with educational polarization.

Within federal law enforcement, FBI agents are pretty universally recognized as the elite. They have (until now) more selective entry requirements and they undergo (until now) more rigorous training.

Unlike at agencies like the DEA, ATF or ICE, applicants to the FBI cannot substitute previous experience in law enforcement for the education requirement. That means that the FBI shapes agents in the practice of law enforcement itself, and there’s no pipeline of local cops into its ranks.

In fact, FBI agents are generally proud of the fact that they are not “cops”. Especially since 9/11, the agency has focused heavily on national security and counter-terrorism tasks. That’s why it took the lead on the various investigations into Trump, such as his theft of classified documents.

The result is that in the populist worldview of MAGA, the FBI is now the snooty, elite, over-educated agency that thinks it’s better than everyone else, and now it needs to be brought down a peg by salt-of-the-earth local cops and DEA agents.

A big goal of the Trump regime’s overhaul of the FBI is to make it possible for agents to transfer from other, less-educated, less-well trained agencies into its ranks. They also want to open up the pipeline from local law enforcement.

The average local cop is much more likely to be Trumpy than the average FBI agent. If you want to turn the FBI into a willing tool of the Trump White House - and one which isn’t going to cause any problems by investigating crimes committed by the regime - then this sort of transformation makes sense.

But it doesn’t really make any sense if you actually want to protect the United States from national security or terrorist threats.

One of the first actions the regime took back in February was to remove FBI agents from terrorism investigations and send them to support ICE in rounding up immigrants.

In terms of defending America, that makes no sense. But if you’re so blinded by racism and populism that you don’t even recognize that sometimes you need education and expertise to protect the homeland, I guess it makes perfect sense. But it also seems like an invitation to disaster.

(For more on Trump's war on the FBI, check out my deep dive into the MAGA worldview of its current director, Kash Patel.)

…and the CIA

Here’s another story in a similar vein.

Just days after Trump’s recent summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, the Trump regime revoked the security clearance of one of the CIA’s top Russia experts. You need a security clearance to work on anything remotely sensitive in the federal government, so not having one means your career is over.

We don’t know exactly why the clearance was revoked, but we can guess: the analyst likely disagreed with Trump’s rosy view of how the summit went. Perhaps she pointed out that Putin is a skilled manipulator who is taking Trump for a ride, or she highlighted secret intelligence showing that the Kremlin considers Trump to be a joke.

The ouster of the agent is part of a trend. Since January, the regime has fired some of the intelligence community’s most important employees - ones dealing with China, with Russia and Ukraine, and with artificial intelligence.

In the case of the CIA Russia expert, a spokesman for the regime tried to spin the move as “actually quite positive, the fact that this is now a top-down president leading the charge” instead of “so-called experts who have read a lot of books but never talked to Putin.”

Wow.

This is absurd on a number of levels. Firstly, even if Trump was some sort of geopolitical savant, it would make no sense for him not to avail himself of all the available expertise that the federal government has to offer. CIA experts have not just read “a lot of books”, but have also had access to decades of secret intelligence which reveal things not known to the public. Any sensible person would want their point of view. And as the president, they would be free to disregard it if they wished.

But Trump is not a sensible person - he is actually a moron who is worryingly disconnected from reality. That can be the only explanation for thinking that “talking to Putin” somehow makes you an expert on him. The record of Putin’s interactions with Trump is one of manipulation and dissembling in which Putin usually gets what he wants. Trump clearly needs all the help he can get.

Unfortunately, now he’s not going to get it. The firing of a well-regarded, veteran officer is a sign to everyone else that if you report a point of view that the regime doesn’t want to hear, your career could be over. It will have a chilling effect on the entire intelligence community.

This is another example of the regime dismantling anything that reeks of expertise or experience in order to better to defer to the whims of its idiot emperor. It is not going to end well.

Trump’s move on Greenland

Lest you think that the Trump regime has given up on its goal of seizing Greenland, think again.

As America Explained reported back in April, the plan to get Greenland has moved from being a vague whim to being something that the machinery of the federal government is trying to make a reality.

The U.S. has launched an operation to influence Greenlandic public opinion and drive a wedge between the island and Denmark. And the Danes have noticed.