Ever since the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency, I have felt like I’m living in some kind of surreal science fiction world where good has become evil and up feels just like down.
Imagine how much worse it is for people like David Axelrod, former Senior Advisor to President Obama. He has to wake up in the land of make believe just like the rest of us, knowing that the President is making up his own reality as he goes through each day.
That would be bad enough, but Axelrod, who is a senior political contributor to CNN, has also found himself swept up in the “alternative facts” coming from the White House.
Axelrod wrote about his frustration and anger today in a commentary on the CNN website. He started the piece with this disturbing line:
“I woke up this morning as an Alternative Fact.”
The cause of his distress is the way that President Trump has twisted the truth in order to justify one of the most outrageous actions of his first week of the Presidency.
The President appears to be relying to an unhealthy degree upon the advice and counsel of Steve Bannon, his own Senior Advisor. Bannon is widely known for his white nationalist beliefs, his anti-Semitic views and his championing of the “alt-right” website Breitbart News.
Bannon cowrote Trump’s less than stellar inaugural address, which referred to “American carnage.” He has had his hands and his opinions all over the many Executive Orders that poured out of the White House last week.
Most disturbing, however, Bannon persuaded the President to appoint him to a permanent seat on the “principals committee” of the National Security Council. This is the group of people who are in charge of national security, terrorism, counterterrorism, cybersecurity….you get the idea. The principals are usually made of up of key military people, like the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Trump has replaced some of those key people with Mr. Bannon. In doing so, he pulled out some of his “alternative facts” and claimed that David Axelrod had held the same position under President Obama.
Axelrod begs to differ. In his commentary today, he explained that he and Obama Press Secretary Josh Gibbs had sat in on deliberations that the NSC had held over how to respond to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He added:
“I was not a member of the committee. I did not speak or participate. I sat on the sidelines as a silent observer with Gibbs because we would be called upon to publicly discuss the president’s decision on that critical matter and the process by which he arrived at it.”
Axelrod is angry and he’s alarmed. He is being lied about, and he resents it.
He also knows that the President relies far too heavily on the far right, nationalist views of Steve Bannon. The man was not elected, and was never cleared by the Senate.
He wants it known that Bannon and Trump are setting a very dangerous path, and that he does not intend to be used as a way of smoothing their way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnbHD7b5MJQ
Featured image by LBJ Library via Flickr. (Public Domain)
