RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/donald-trump-fooling-this-time-security-clearances/

It is said that the adage “he who hesitates is lost” is an adaptation of a line from Joseph Addison’s 1712 play Cato. I do not believe that Donald Trump is a student of the co-founder of The Spectator, but he has clearly absorbed that nugget of practical wisdom.

Within hours of taking office on Monday, Trump issued some 200 executive orders and proclamations affecting the government’s conduct on everything from immigration to DEI, from energy policy to the 1,500 people incarcerated in Washington jails because they joined in the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  

It is one thing to issue orders and proclamations. It is another thing to see them carried out successfully. But here we are, barely fifty hours into the second Trump administration, and the activity on the ground is furious. On Tuesday, heads of all government agencies were ordered to shut down their DEI offices by 5 p.m. today, Wednesday, and place all DEI hires on paid administrative leave “immediately.” Trump is not fooling this time. The order also directs the heads and acting heads of every agency to ask employees “if they know of any efforts to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.” 

That chill in the air that you feel is not due solely to the polar vortex making the mercury plunge. The country is also in the grip of the Trump common-sense vortex. With respect to illegal immigration, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan reports that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement team made 308 arrests yesterday. Following his policy of going after the “worst first,” the people arrested were all violent criminals: murderers, rapists, gang members and the like. The total number of people apprehended crossing the southern border illegally has dropped from between 10,000 and 12,000 under Joe Biden to 766. That’s in two days. 

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/24/lets-turn-the-pdb-into-the-trump-daily-intelligence-briefing/

The Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) was once a well-regarded daily intelligence summary prepared for the president and his most senior national security officials that provided timely and vital highly classified intelligence. Unfortunately, due to the bloated and increasingly politicized intelligence bureaucracy, the PDB’s usefulness and quality have plummeted over the last twenty years.

President Trump has well-founded suspicions about the U.S. Intelligence Community, which was weaponized against his campaigns and first administration. It therefore will take radical changes to fix the PDB and assure President Trump that his daily intelligence briefings are fair and objective.

I speak on this subject from experience. As a CIA analyst in the 1980s and 90s, I drafted over 50 PDB articles and received feedback from two presidents. At that time, the PDB contained 7-10 concise, carefully written articles on critical national security issues. Although the PDB usually did not shy away from controversial issues or bad news, articles would be added on issues of interest to the current president.

The PDB staff I worked with served for decades. Most PDB editors also served as briefers and were usually senior CIA analysts late in their careers who kept a low profile. They were on the PDB staff to serve, not for attention or to advance their careers. Although not every president liked or trusted the PDB, most did because these officers worked to produce a daily intelligence product that was not about politics or currying favor with the president or Congress.

Unfortunately, things changed for the worse for the PDB in the mid-1990s when the CIA decided to staff it with younger, up-and-coming officers and not just senior officers approaching retirement. Unfortunately, the CIA’s increasingly liberal analysis directorate exploited this change to put young liberal ideologues on the PDB staff, who used these assignments to rocket up the career ladder and advance the intelligence deep state.

https://tomklingenstein.com/trumps-mandate-restore-national-sovereignty/

Donald J. Trump’s 2024 electoral victory was so decisive that, for the first time since 1988, congressional Democrats did not challenge the certification of a Republican presidential victory. Trump won the popular vote, swept the swing states, and ran ahead of down ballot Republicans. Unquestionably, he has a mandate to govern. That mandate belongs to the MAGA agenda, not to conventional Republican priorities.

President Trump best defined his political mission in his 2016 address at the Republican National Convention: “The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will put America First. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America First, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect.” In his second inaugural address this week, as he echoed these same themes, the 47th president’s first promise to the American people was simple: “Our sovereignty will be reclaimed.” 

Trump’s goal, in 2024 as much as in 2016, is to reorient politics and policy towards America’s national wellbeing through common sense reforms. (Again in the second inaugural, he promised a “revolution of common sense.”) These reforms include protecting American workers and balancing foreign trade, revitalizing manufacturing, securing energy independence, ending foreign wars and drawing down military commitments abroad, mass deportation of illegal aliens, limiting legal immigration to maintain wage stability and cultural unity, and nurturing patriotism and civic confidence.