Oppose Me and Be Prepared to Die: the Message of the Security Detail Revocations
By pardoning the J6 insurrectionists, Trump empowered a violent base of loyalists. By stripping security details from his perceived enemies, he leaves them exposed, including to threats of his own making.
Since his inauguration, Trump has revoked the security details of four officials who served during his first term. These are men whose lives are at risk because of service under Trump, and whose security details Biden repeatedly renewed, but who have fallen from Trump’s good graces. Although Trump justified removing their security based on the high cost of continuing it, he has not, apparently, tried to save public money by removing the security details of anyone else.
The cost of this type of security is prohibitively expensive for private non-billionnaires such as these, and private security at any level lacks access to the tools employed by the federal government to keep people safe.
Three of the four newly unprotected, John Bolton (national security advisor 2018 to 2019), Mike Pompeo (secretary of state 2018-2021), and Brian Hook (senior policy advisor to Pompeo, 2018-2020), are said to remain under threat from Iran, which, according to DOJ, has attempted to hire US residents to murder them, in retaliation for their role in assassinating a top Iranian military commander at Trump’s behest.
Since working for Trump, however, Bolton published a blistering White House memoir (David Ignatius in WashPo: “As much as you think you know about the arrogance, vanity and sheer incompetence of Trump’s years in the White House, Bolton’s account will still astonish you.”), and Pompeo criticized Trump and considered running for president against him (“We need more seriousness, less noise, and leaders who are looking forward, not staring in the rearview mirror claiming victimhood,” he tweeted in 2022). Hook, it seems, is just too tight with Pompeo. (Trump also removed Hook from another position with a late-night “YOU’RE FIRED!” on social media l week and said he won’t have any of Pompeo’s people working for him this time.)
It’s the fourth revocation, of Anthony Fauci’s detail, that’s most revealing. Fauci, the infectious disease doctor and scientist who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, didn’t come under threat as a result of coordinating assassinations of foreign military leaders. He’s in danger because he offended Trump, by correcting Trump’s bad science and dangerous health advice during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the closing weeks of his unsuccessful reelection campaign, “Trump made … Fauci his foil,” (NYT Oct. 19, 2020 ), calling him a “disaster” and the scientific advisors Fauci represented “these idiots.”
The killers plotting against Fauci aren’t Iran and its operatives, but Trump and his. Trump is both the creator of the threat and, now, the remover of the protection from the threat.
But more than merely exposing Fauci to a threat that’s lingered since 2020, Trump also, hours after his inauguration, greatly magnified that threat by pardoning 1500 violent loyalists and conveying that violence on his behalf is unpunishable.
The Bolton/Pompeo/Hook security detail revocations also look different in this light. Yes, these three are in danger from Iran. But simply by removing their security detail, Trump also tells J6ers and other fanatics that these former Trumpers are now approved as targets and ready to receive what they have coming.
The message to those who haven’t fallen out of favor—yet—is equally clear.
Best,
David