WASHINGTON, DC—Cable news anchor Chris Hayes characterized this as the week President Donald Trump “goes full Mad King.”

Trump appears to be engaged in a purge of his administration, in which career professionals in senior roles are dismissed for perceived disloyalty and replaced by those whose primary qualifications are pro-Trump partisanship.

“It’s extremely concerning, and it is unusual,” says Scott Anderson, an expert on governance with the Brookings think tank who is senior editor of the publication Lawfare, which analyzes national security issues. In most presidential administrations, Anderson says, there’s a tension between political appointees and career civil service experts that results in a push and pull and some eventual convergence of opinion.

“But you don’t see that happening with the Trump administration, because they have come in with a very adversarial view. They view anybody departing from it, or raising questions about it, as somebody who is somehow categorically opposed to them, as opposed to somebody trying to advise them on ways to make their policies better. And that really should be immensely concerning.”

Prompting that concern are multiple reports over the past week characterizing a “psychological shift” for Trump since his acquittal in the impeachment trial, as he has turned to rooting out “snakes” in a “systematic effort” to “clean house.” Alongside a wave of recent firings and staffing shuffles, and public comments lashing out at judges and suggesting targets for the Justice Department, staff have been asked to identify political appointees insufficiently loyal to Trump so they can be replaced.

Former navy Adm. William McRaven recently wrote about one prominent case — the firing of the director of national intelligence Joe Maguire to replace him with German ambassador Richard Grenell, who has no intelligence experience.

“When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil,” McRaven wrote in the Washington Post.

The case of Maguire is a particularly stark illustration: Reportedly, a senior employee of Maguire’s briefed legislators on intelligence that Russia is again meddling in the presidential election, in aid of Donald Trump. Trump was angered by this, fearing it would give his political opponents ammunition, and dressed down Maguire, then fired him, according to the Washington Post. Then Trump replaced Maguire with Grenell, who has no apparent qualifications for the highest national intelligence job in the country.

“Everyone knows he has no qualifications for this job,” Mark Groombridge, a former aide to former National Security Adviser John Bolton told Foreign Policy, reflecting a consensus of public comments by intelligence experts, one echoed even by some Republicans in the Senate.

It certainly looks like a transparent politicization of the intelligence apparatus, redirecting its significant resources to protecting the president rather than the country. It comes immediately on the heels of evidence of a similar politicization in the Justice Department, in which Trump has publicly intervened to lobby for lighter treatment of his allies and harsher investigation of his opponents. Tuesday, Trump began attacking two Supreme Court justices as biased against him.

Anderson says in the Justice Department, Trump’s tendency to buck criticism is “more dangerous in certain ways” because the Justice Department is responsible for enforcing the law and has always demanded a degree of objectivity and separation from political influence.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the impeachment trial, Trump fired or demanded resignations from key witnesses who testified in the investigation or didn’t publicly defend him.

Johnny McEntee, a longtime Trump loyalist recently brought back to the White House as head of the personnel department is asking staff for lists of insufficiently loyal appointees within the administration to root out “snakes” and “bad people,” according to reporting by Axios.

Axios also reported on a memo to Trump that suggested Jessie Liu’s nomination for a key Treasury Department role was withdrawn because, as a U.S. Attorney, she didn’t bring prosecutions against opponents of Trump and Republicans, and participated in those against Trump aids Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.

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The “systematic attempt to sweep out officials perceived to be disloyal” has, according to a New York Times report, led to a “a season of turmoil” inside the White House.

The appearance from the outside is of a redirection of government resources to serve the president’s interests — and an administration increasingly unconcerned about giving that impression.

“The thing here is that the Trump administration doesn’t even really seem interested in receiving advice (from non-partisan experts),” Anderson says. “They say, ‘We want a unified view about what it is we’re working for, and we’re not interested in alternatives.’ That’s a dangerous way to drive policy. And it’s so counter to our usual conceptions of what good governance is.”

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