This weekend brought the very confusing story of President Donald Trump’s decision to personally intervene in the case of U.S. Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was acquitted of war crimes in a recent military tribunal.
Trump wanted Gallagher to keep his Trident pin, the honorarium SEALs receive, and personally demanded the Navy allow Gallagher to keep it.
Now, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer is out, having either resigned or been forced out after he either went behind Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s back to work on a deal for Gallagher to remain a SEAL or because he upset the president by publically disagreeing with him. Adding to the confusion, in his resignation letter, Spencer seemed to hit at the president, saying he could not “obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath I took.”
It’s a messy situation that delves into the code of the military, as well as the secrecy of special operation units, but one man brazenly concluded that resigning rather than working for the president meant it was time for one thing: An ideological purge of the entire government.
RT if you support President Trump firing *every* employee in the federal government, military & intel community who is openly working to undermine their Commander-in-Chief
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 25, 2019
Hunt them down & clear them out
3 years of “resistance” to @realDonaldTrump from *his employees* is ENOUGH
Turning Point USA meme specialist and noted plagiarist Benny Johnson is calling for the president to fire every government employee who doesn’t support Trump, which is, despite the right-wing blog’s ostensible obsession with personal liberty… pretty much the way a fascist government works.
“RT if you support President Trump firing *every* employee in the federal government, military & intel community who is openly working to undermine their Commander-in-Chief. Hunt them down & clear them out,” he tweeted Sunday evening.
It’s so fundamentally un-American that despite Johnson’s propensity for flabbergastingly stilted tweets and memes, this blew people on Twitter away.
we aren't north korea https://t.co/34h7SuP7Gs
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) November 25, 2019
RT if you recognize that this is: a) illegal; and b) insane. https://t.co/j2lxMsZrob
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) November 25, 2019
https://twitter.com/ChrissieKeffler/status/1199018318524506115
Federal workers are employees of the American people, not one particular party or faction. The president is not a ceo and he does not own the government. They are not his employees. https://t.co/o1FBVeb2eV
— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) November 25, 2019
“Hunt down” government employees based on their political affiliation.
— Randy Bryce (@IronStache) November 25, 2019
That’s a literal call for a war on workers.#1u #wiunion https://t.co/zlDIe3Athj
https://twitter.com/Redpainter1/status/1198976957142224896
As many pointed out, in addition to this bizarre call for ideological purity, the government doesn’t really work this way.
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