We have no idea if the anonymous op-ed writer is still employed, but over the past year, we have seen just how flawed was his or her thinking and how deluded was the decision of hundreds of political appointees to remain in place.

Let’s say you are at the State Department. Over the past year, you have seen Trump (backed up fully by his most loyal flunky, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) abandon the Kurds, ceding domination of the region to Syria, Turkey and Russia. We saw Trump repeatedly invite foreign countries to intervene in our elections and delay aid to Ukraine (with the Russian bear breathing down its neck) to achieve his political aims. Trump, with Pompeo’s assistance, has accorded North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un unprecedented legitimacy and now ignores missile tests. Trump allowed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to escape any accountability for his involvement in the gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and refuses to cut off support for the Saudis’ genocidal war in Yemen. Pompeo refused to protect superb career diplomat Marie Yovanovitch, our ambassador to Ukraine, from a political hit job.

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How, then, has a political appointee in the State Department protected America? The self-delusion needs to stop. Those who remain enable a corrupt, unfit and disastrous president and his unprincipled secretary of state. Remaining in the halls of power means you’ve sacrificed intellectual and moral integrity and remained silent about the dozens, maybe hundreds, of outrages to which you have been witness. Trump has gotten worse on your watch.

The same is true of each and every department and agency in the Trump administration. At the Justice Department, lawyers have been asked to misrepresent the real reason for adding the citizenship question to the census, ignore impeachable conduct by the president in soliciting foreign intervention in our election and support an attorney general traveling the globe to prove a crackpot theory about the 2016 election that would undermine the findings of the intelligence community (including the FBI) and take ludicrous positions in a variety of cases (e.g. eradicating the Affordable Care Act, allowing the president to snatch funds to pay for the wall in contravention of Congress). Remaining at the Justice Department means you will risk your integrity and law license to cater to the whims of an unmoored president and an attorney general who acts like the president’s lawyer, not the country’s.

In sum, the delusion of “preventing even worse things” or “keeping the trains running” needs to end. The president has turned the federal government into a corrupt racket. To participate in it means to enable it and to keep its secrets. It is long past the time to rip the bandage off and reveal the ugly truths embedded in an administration that serves the president’s corrupt interests.

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