OPINION:
Democrats write off President Donald Trump’s concerns about leaks, anonymous statements to the press, and other malfeasance by Obama holdovers and career bureaucrats inside the government, as merely the paranoid ramblings of someone who has no right to the job he was elected to hold. They’re attempting nothing less than to nullify the election.
They call it “the resistance,” as if it were a version of the French Maquis of World War II bedeviling the Nazis, but it’s more correctly called an insurrection, an attempt to destroy a legal government and replace it with a revolutionary government, reducing the United States to the likes of a Third-World excuse for a country.
Only a month after the inauguration of Donald Trump, Robert Reich, the secretary of Labor in the Bill Clinton administration, posted on his Facebook account a tribute to the federal workers who had joined this “resistance.” What he had to say was taken from a blog post from Washington’s other newspaper, and he included his observation that “the resistance is growing inside federal departments, coming from federal workers charged with implementing Trump’s agenda.”
Mr. Obama remained in Washington when his term ended, almost unprecedented among past presidents, on the transparent pretense that he wanted his daughters to finish the school year with their chums in Washington, when it was clear that he wanted to stay in the capital as inspiration for the “resistance.” Now, with his famous legacy in tatters, he has given up the pretense, having purchased the fortified mansion which the family has been renting, perhaps to be taken as a sign that he will stand with the “resistance” when the liberation is at hand.
Career bureaucrats can now seek advice as well as inspiration from Mr. Obama on how to push back against the new president’s agenda. The “resistance,” unlike the French resistance (without the quotation marks), has yet to begin cutting telephone and electric wires, poisoning wells and blowing up rail crossings, but assassination fantasies obviously lie harbored deep within brave “resistance” breasts, as Kathy Griffin’s celebrated mock beheading demonstrates.
Rogue Twitter accounts have been created to embarrass President Trump with fake news, slowdowns are planned within the Justice Department, and other mischief is plotted if the bureaucracies are “asked to shift grants away from their mission.” Patriotism is measured in dollars and cents.
“I’m sure these are only the tips of a vast upsurge of resistance inside government,” Mr. Reich wrote. “You see, most government workers want to do their jobs, and they believe in democracy. Let us pause to appreciate and applaud our federal workforce.”
Oh, dear. The government — the real one, not the government of Democratic fantasy — is now under attack from an axis of Russians and a version of the American Maquis. President Trump, like FDR before him, might be forced to decide which of two opposing enemies to fight first.
The “resistance” seems to be under the command of Sen. Charles Schumer, the leader of the Democratic minority, blocking the Trump agenda and raising the bar on every important piece of legislation. Federal judges appointed by Messrs. Clinton and Obama repeal and rewrite law from the bench. They think that losing the election does not deny them the right to continue to set policy and run things. The conflict creates a constitutional crisis over whether the will of the people, as expressed at the ballot box, actually matters. But what do “the people” know unless there’s a sore loser to tell them?
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