Former Trump Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Richard Grenell told the “Ingraham Angle” on Monday that, as Democrats put politics before people, the real battle in the election in the fall is between DC and America.
“The fact of the matter is,” Grenell said, “we have a real problem in Washington, D.C., because it’s a system that it no longer is Republicans and Democrats pushing against each other to create good policy. It’s a fight between Washington and the rest of America.”
Grenell understands that there is an entrenched political/legal class in DC that thinks itself above the rest of the nation and acts accordingly when designing policies that benefit themselves to the exclusion of everybody else. A case in point is the recent criticism of the president by James Mattis.
General Mattis, though warrior that he was, became a prisoner of the DC way of thinking in terms of policy. As the saying goes, generals are always fighting the last war. Thus when the president decided on sensible troop redeployments, Mattis protested. Not because of the value of the the troop redeployment, but because as a high ranking member of the DC political class, with extra points now because he is inanely anti-Trump, his own nest was threatened by the president. So he lashed out at the president like a scornful seventh grader for a better looking classmate.
One of the biggest opponents of bringing US troops home was Mattis. He fought hard for the status quo. @realDonaldTrump ran and won the election partly by commitng to this policy.
Why would Mattis take the job & then undermine the policy? Because it’s what DC types do.— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) June 6, 2020
Grenell said, “What we have [is] a system in Washington where people get jobs if you’re there, if you know someone and you work your way up, and it’s like musical chairs from one agency to another. There is no outside thought, there’s no outside perspective.”
Grenell nails it. DC is a city not of merit, but of connections, as is any city where government is the largest employer and primary business. DC hates outsiders that it can’t bend to the system (as it has Mattis) because they have nothing to lose. As Trump came to the presidency worth billions and with fame already, DC has little to offer him and even less to threaten him with. Which makes him very dangerous to the power elite. To paraphrase the president during the 2016 campaign, “If I lose I go back to being a happy billionaire with a supermodel wife.”
Grenell sees why the political class hates Trump: “He’s breaking their system. He doesn’t play by the rules.” Exactly. They can get to almost everyone else. Trump doesn’t care. Ironically, in a city that hypocritically rails against the rich, Trump’s wealth insulates him from their slings and arrows.
The former DNI saw the insider attitude and lack of appreciation of merit during his tenure as intel chief: “I saw that at ODNI. I saw that by entering the intelligence world, and senators from the Democratic Party saying, ‘You have no experience, what are you doing — why should you be there?’ He [Senator Mark Warner, D-VA] said that I wasn’t qualified. I actually am a receiver of intelligence, and [I’m] an expert on the consumer part of intelligence and how to utilize it, but that perspective is never brought to Washington.” It isn’t because that could qualify as professionalism. Most of DC avoids that like, well, a virus.
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