Dear Friends,
It seems to me, a wise new President would fire the head of every agency the moment he or she accepts office, not to do so invites disaster. A new President has a million things to learn, they need to get accustomed to the strangle hold of constant security and they even have to move into new surroundings upsetting even their home life in the transition, so the last thing any new President needs is a backstabber in a trusted position. There is no counting the number of princes, regents, presidents, kings and prime ministers, who have been destroyed by a spy in their inner circle left over from a past administration. This maxim is never more true when a new President is a rival of the old President.
Even if the new prince is a close political ally of the old prince, the new prince should remove all the old prince’s means of causing trouble. When we don’t know they are in fact enemies, friends can often be the most dangerous foes, because they are in positions to cause no end to the mischief. People are mercurial, we can be offended at something that is not meant to offend, we can feel slighted even when no slight was intended and we are greedy which makes us easy to manipulate. As Machiavelli said, A wise prince would rather be feared than loved, for people being fickle will betray one they love but never one they fear…
A new prince that leaves a few of his rival’s people in key positions is asking to be undermined at every turn, for the same reason the Medici didn’t hire Machiavelli, because that genius had been an ally of the Borgia. They understood the ways someone in the inner circle can undermine the intentions of the leader are innumerable. They can leak selected information to their town criers for propaganda purposes, garble orders to weaken command and control of any situation, foment disunity among the other confidants, form a cabal within the inner circle to work against the prince, and even kill the prince himself given the chance. Only a fool walks a dangerous path when a safe one is available, is a Confucian saying… and in this case it means, it is foolish to keep an enemy’s allies in positions to harm when it is easy to get rid of them and their machinations, risking disaster for the prince and the nation for no good advantage.
A key philosophical point of progressivism is that the end justifies the means. When Machiavelli said a thing similar, he meant that when the final authority does a thing, since there is no one who can question let alone challenge an authority, (remember, this was before the Enlightenment), whatever means the authority uses become irrelevant, it is only the ends that are viewed. As in Pericles building of the Parthenon, we only judge the ends, the beautiful architectural achievement, rather than the means of it’s production, Pericles becoming a tyrant which led Athens to ruin. Progressives believe however that if the ends are noble enough, any means to achieve them are acceptable, and so have no faith, cannot be trusted and are even less honest than the average lot of man, which is pretty dishonest.
To practice good faith with people of no faith is pollyannaish at best. As we see with Trump, the new prince will at some point be forced to dismiss the allies of his old enemies, at political cost, a cost he wouldn’t have had to pay if he had done a general housecleaning upon coming into office. This again plays into the hands of his political rivals. They can use the disruption as propaganda against him which today, given the advancements in the area of mind control of the masses, can be very devastating. Meanwhile the rest of the progressive surrogates can continue to work their mischief in the dark. Trump will be forced, by the machinations of the progressives he so conveniently left in positions where they can hurt him, to fire others of his actual allies after the scheming has come to fruition and others left behind as political suicide bombers.
When Obama came into office he fired everyone and there was no political fallout. Had Trump done the same thing, there would have been political fallout simply because the media as a group, are progressives his political enemies, but with all the other dust in the air it would have fallen into obscurity, clouded by the absurd allegations of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf. Trump didn’t fire the lot however, and now will pay the political price for the rest of his first term, until he finally ends up firing them all, as he should have in the first place. If he were a wise President, Trump would use this opportunity to fire every single progressive in a position to leak or undermine… let us see if Trump is wise.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
