When your own team becomes your loudest alarm bell
There is a management saying: if one employee calls you difficult, they might be the problem. If every employee calls you difficult, you are the problem.
By that logic, Donald Trump is not just a problem. He is a five-alarm fire, and the people he personally hired to run the country are the ones pulling the alarm.
This is not the opposition talking. This is a chorus of his own chosen allies – Cabinet members, generals, lifelong Republicans – people who stood in the Situation Room and held the nation’s secrets. Their collective, horrified verdict should be the end of the debate.
When the insiders who enabled you become the ones warning about you, it is not a political attack. It is a national security briefing.
The Moron Consensus
Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO Trump tasked with running diplomacy, found his boss to be a “moron” who possessed a “really limited” understanding of global history and law. “It is really hard to have a conversation with someone who does not even understand the reason for what we are talking about,” Tillerson said.
Worse were the requests. Tillerson revealed that Trump routinely asked him to violate federal law or international treaties, then grew frustrated when told no. The most powerful CEO in the world was reduced to the role of a weary parent, constantly explaining to the President why we cannot have ice cream for breakfast or launch missiles at a neighbour.
Help Wanted Ad: Must be comfortable with a Commander-in-Chief who views the Constitution as a minor obstacle.
The Fascist in the Room
Then there is John Kelly, the four-star Marine general who served as Trump’s Chief of Staff. Kelly did not use metaphors; he used definitions. He stated that Trump “prefers the dictator approach to government,” fits the definition of a fascist, and praised Adolf Hitler, saying “Hitler did some good things.”
Kelly also reported Trump’s desire for “the kind of generals that Hitler had”, a wish that ignores the historical reality that Hitler’s generals largely led their nation to ruin.
When thirteen other former Trump officials signed a letter backing Kelly’s claims, they wrote they were “sadly not surprised.”
Sadly not surprised. Let that phrase sink in. These are not pundits or political opponents. They are the people who sat with him daily. Their reaction to “the President praised Hitler” was a resigned, “Yes, that sounds like him.” When a four-star general and a dozen of his colleagues label the President a fascist, the building is not smouldering – it is engulfed.
The Exodus of the “Best People”
The pattern is a tidal wave.
- Mark Esper, Trump’s Secretary of Defence, called him “an unprincipled person” and revealed that officials formed a “blocking coalition” to prevent Trump from doing “really bad things, dangerous things.”
- H.R. McMaster, his National Security Adviser, said Trump was actively helping Vladimir Putin.
- James Mattis, another Defence Secretary, resigned with a letter that was a 300-word repudiation of Trump’s character.
- Mike Pence, the avatar of loyalty, finally drew a line at overturning an election, telling Trump, “You are wrong.”
They were not fired. They fled.
The Sabotage
In 2018, a “senior administration official” wrote an anonymous op-ed describing how staff were “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” The author later expanded this into a book, A Warning, revealing that officials kept pre-signed resignation letters in their desks and even discussed invoking the 25th Amendment.
This is not a government. It is an intervention.
The Retribution
Now, in 2025, we see the final evolution: the criminalisation of criticism.
John Bolton is indicted over classified documents, despite having prior clearance for his book. James Comey is charged for allegedly lying to Congress. Letitia James faces bank fraud charges after successfully prosecuting Trump.
Three prominent critics, three federal indictments in rapid succession.
Bolton’s response was to quote Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria: “You show me the man, and I will show you the crime.”
This is no longer politics. It is the raw exercise of power to silence truth. When the state punishes those who expose its leader’s failings, the republic is already in its twilight.
The Honest Job Ad
Trump’s 2024 promise was to hire “only the best people.” The “best people” from his first term are now his most damning witnesses.
The truthful help wanted ad for a second term would have read:
Wanted: Sycophants. Must display wilful ignorance of the law, accept delayed compensation (legal bills are your own), and possess a high tolerance for eventual betrayal. Constitutional oath optional. Soul required for sacrifice. Former employees need not apply – they are currently witnesses for the prosecution.
The only candidate left is the one who, when told the previous staff considered the President a dangerous fascist, simply asks, “When do I start?”
The Final Warning
This transcends Trump. It is a test for the nation.
The people who know him best have used the most severe language available to them. We are being warned by the firefighters that the President is an arsonist. To ignore them is not an act of political loyalty. It is a surrender of national conscience.
The pattern is clear. The warnings are deafening. The only remaining question is whether we will heed them, or pretend we cannot hear.
Note: The author’s views are their own. No former Trump officials were available for comment, as they were otherwise occupied drafting memoirs, giving depositions, or consulting with their solicitors.
PS: And in this context, Dr Kevin Rudd’s assessment of Trump as “the most destructive president in history” and a “traitor to the West” seems less like a political attack and more like a sober, if not restrained, diagnosis from an expert in the psychopathology of politics.
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The self-destructive streak in the American psyche on full display with this latest round of Trump at the helm. The body politic knew the nature of the man and still voted him back into power.
The greatest difficulty for Americans, generally, is their ignorance & immaturity, their lack of emotional or intellectual depth, their fascination for spectacle and superficiality. Hard to register any sympathy for a nation determined to do its worst.
I only disagree (slightly) about one thing: Rudd’s assessment of Trump is actually quite restrained when you consider everything the latter has done and is doing.
But who is going to remove him, even the Mid Terms are doubtful to work.
I was always hopeful about the mid terms but less so now.
But the most awful thing is how can voters ever think about voting for a criminal. It defies logic but it also says a lot about their voting system.
The core issue is that this started way before Trump. But with current technology via social media it seems easy to fool the masses. Scary and utterly awful.
Reply to Canguro:
You’re right about the self-destructive streak, and about spectacle winning over substance. But I’d push back gently on the “hard to register sympathy” part.
The Americans who voted against this; there were tens of millions, now have to watch their own house being demolished from the inside. They’re not ignorant. They’re hostages. The nurse in Michigan, the teacher in Pennsylvania, the preservation officer watching the bulldozers; they knew exactly what Trump was, and they’re living the consequences of other people’s choices.
That’s the particular cruelty of democracy’s fragility: the informed are dragged down with the deluded. The mature suffer alongside the immature. Virtue doesn’t grant immunity from other people’s votes.
And yes, there’s a maddening superficiality in American political culture ; the franchise model of history, the cult of more, the equation of gold leaf with greatness. But that’s not unique to America. It’s the human condition under late capitalism. We’re all vulnerable to the seduction of spectacle. Australia’s not immune. Neither is anywhere else.
The real tragedy isn’t that Americans deserve this. It’s that institutions can’t protect people who’ve forgotten why institutions matter. A republic can survive ignorance. It can even survive malice. But it can’t survive indifference to its own architecture; the patient dismantling of the weight-bearing walls while everyone films it for content.
So I’d argue for sympathy; not for the nation as an abstraction, but for the millions trapped inside it who saw this coming and couldn’t stop it. They’re not doing their worst. Their worst is being done to them.
And they’re showing us, in real time, what happens when the lease expires but the tenant refuses to leave.
– Urban Wronski
Thank you, David, especially for the gentle nudge towards nuance and a willingness to acknowledge those who didn’t sign up for the nightmare. I have a son, now in his late thirties, who lived in North America for a dozen or so years and has recently returned to Australia. I encouraged him to so do around seven years ago but his life was good, on a roll so to speak, an in demand classical musician, but I think that even for him, a privileged artist who could find easy employment virtually anywhere, the reality of living in such an unstable society eventually outweighed the benefits of being in that environment.
You’re absolutely correct… there are literally millions of people in that country in despair at what has become of their beloved home.
A presidential system forever abused, and an arcane and dubious constitution now entirely broken. The out-of-control political donor system and electoral college blowing the notion of democracy to smithereens. An inevitability ripe for T-Rump. The notion of ‘separation of powers’ and ‘rule of law’ so broken, that all freebooters & opportunists from POTUS down are just in it for a buck.
And in the chase of that buck, they’ve subjugated faith to the creation of a christo-fascist state. A pseudo-theocracy where they can allocate blame for their designer Armageddon end-of-times on divine intervention.
The millions in despair opted for celebrities, and sat in the good pews of self-satisfied delusion whilst the proselytizers and propagandists sold them bling & BS and the great American exceptionalism. It conveniently shortened their memories allowing them to abdicate their responsibilities. Just how much of the ‘West’ was sucker-punched.