If he wins re-election next month, President
Donald Trump is planning a massive culling of some of his key appointees, says a new
report by Axios’
Jonathan Swan and
Alayna Treene.
The heads lined up on the metaphorical chopping block reportedly include FBI Director
Christopher Wray, CIA Director
Gina Haspel, and Defense Secretary
Mark Esper.
Two people who have discussed these officials’ fates with Trump were the sources for the story, and said that the president would have fired these officials already if not for what Axios described as the “political headaches” of doing so before the election.
Wray and Haspel are “despised and distrusted almost universally in Trump’s inner circle,” write Swan and Treene, and a victory on November 3rd would “embolden” Trump to purge anyone he views as disloyal, or who is unable or unwilling to execute his preferred policies.
It is common for presidents who are re-elected for a second term to shuffle around some key officials and bring in new faces to help guide their agenda for their final years in office, but removing the heads of America’s main intelligence and security agencies all at the same time is raising eyebrows.
Trump has also expressed dissatisfaction with other top officials in his administration, including Secretary of Education
Betsy DeVos and Attorney General
Bill Barr, although Axios’ sources said that he had not yet made any “formal plan” to fire them, and was focusing his ire on Wray, Haspel, and Esper.
Unsurprisingly, a core factor in the president’s desire to replace these officials is their failure to blindly follow Trump in some of the conspiracy theory-fueled investigations he has sought to launch against political opponents. For example, Wray refused to launch an investigation into
Hunter Biden’s foreign business activities and testified in September that the FBI had not seen evidence of widespread fraud related to mail-in ballots, and Haspel has opposed efforts by Director of National Intelligence
John Ratcliffe to declassify documents that Trump believes show how government officials “spied” on his campaign.
Anyone who does survive the pending November purge should expected even more “
loyalty tests” moving forward, noted Axios, the culmination of ongoing efforts since February to drive out “Never Trumpers” and other insufficiently loyal bureaucrats.
Officially, the White House is denying these reports. “We have no personnel announcements at this time nor would it be appropriate to speculate about changes after the election or in a 2nd term,” White House spokesman
Judd Deere said to Axios.
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