Biden Fires Trump Advisory Board Appointees
In doing so, he’s promoting leftist groupthink at our service academies and making accountability less likely.
Let’s begin at the end: “I’m not resigning, but you should.”
So said Kellyanne Conway to President Joe Biden, who this week called for her immediate resignation from the Board of Visitors to the U.S. Air Force Academy. At the same time, Biden demanded the resignations of every advisory-board appointee to our nation’s service academies made by former President Donald Trump.
Conway is the former senior counselor to President Trump and the first woman to lead a successful U.S. presidential campaign. Her letter to Biden, though only a page in length, is a tour de force, for it rightly and utterly flays our nation’s 46th president:
Your decision is disappointing but understandable given the need to distract from a news cycle that has you mired in multiple self-inflicted crises and plummeting poll numbers, including a rise in new COVID cases, a dismal jobs report, inflation, [a] record of drugs coming across the southern border, and, of course, the chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan that has left hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghan allies stranded under Taliban rule.
It was an honor to serve on [this board]. The brave men and women in uniform represent the best of our great nation. It was also a privilege to serve a President whose actions resulted in the deaths of terrorists like al-Baghdadi and Qasem Soleimani, rather than a President whose actions resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members.
Other Trump appointees purged by this feckless, petty, and vindictive commander-in-chief include former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought, former Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, former Army Vice Chief of Staff General Jack Keane, former Pentagon Senior Advisor Douglas Macgregor, former U.S. Army North Commander Guy Swan III, West Point graduate and former Chair of the American Battle Monuments Commission David Urban, and West Point graduate and former Army Captain Meaghan Mobbs.
Mobbs, a clinical psychology predoctoral fellow at Columbia University, has researched and written extensively about modern-day military and veteran issues. “It’s imperative that we fight for this,” she said. “One of the last places where we should be politicizing anything is at our United States military academies. … I served alongside Obama appointees and they were extraordinarily respectful and embraced all of us that were appointed during that period.”
Not so during the era of Joe Biden, who’s been doing his best to change the subject from his disgraceful defeat and surrender in Afghanistan and his shameful behavior at a solemn transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base.
Senate Republicans demanded hearings, because they want sworn testimony from both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley — which seems the least we should expect, given their catastrophic failures. Beginning next week, Republicans will get their wish, and by the end of the month, we’ll see just what Austin and Milley have to say for themselves.
Will Biden, Austin, and Milley escape accountability for what they’ve wrought? Perhaps so. But while the president and his surrogates try to pin the blame on Trump, we should at least hold Biden to account for what his handlers told him to say at a presser three weeks ago: “I will not mislead the American people. Nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here. I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.”
Talk is cheap, Mr. President. And your words so far are meaningless.